Stencil Type

Steven Heller, Louise Fili

An invaluable collection of underappreciated stencil typography through history.

Designers often look to the past to inform their work. In this new paperback edition, design gurus Steven Heller and Louise Fili explore the variety and influence of the world’s most ubiquitous typographic style, which dates to prehistoric times and has been used on a range of surfaces, from street signs, buildings, and bridges to packaging and posters.

This expansive sourcebook presents hundreds of international examples of stencil typography from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. The wonderful array of stencil types highlights surprising instances of artistry and ingenuity from a broad range of locations and objects—from military, traffic, and transportation to home decoration, mass communication, and street art. And the survey is global, drawing on design from America, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Eastern Europe.

An introduction surveys the history and applications of stencil typography, and samples of stencil type ordered by their geographic origin.

Contributors

Steven Heller

Author

Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA Design: Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His many previous books include
Typographic Universe, New Modernist Type, and Scripts.

Louise Fili

Author

Louise Fili is director of Fili Design, a New York-based design studio specializing in typographic treatments. The recipient of the AIGA Medal in 2014, she is the coauthor with Steven Heller of Scripts.