Adapting Advanced Typographic Taxonomy Principles for Modular Stencil System Classification

Modular stencil systems have long been an important part of the typographer’s toolset and, more recently, have experienced a resurgence as part of typography teaching toolkits. Constant advances in fast prototyping and manufacturing technologies, combined with ongoing research on their history and development, may further popularize these tools on educational and creative settings. Their classification, for evaluation and comparison purposes, is paramount to their successful implementation on those settings, and the complexity and variety of their corpus, on account of their modules being tailored to typography and lettering and offering levels of flexibility comparable to those found in cutting-edge variable typefaces, necessarily follows that of the contemporary typographic corpus. As such, we propose the repurposing of extant advanced typographic taxonomy systems, namely those especially tailored for modular, geometric and variable typography. These are already based on a fine-grained understanding of typographic anatomy, and include categories, such as those related to grids and to module variety and shapes, also particularly relevant to stencil systems. In order to tackle the complexity of these stencil systems, we follow a theoretical approach, through a non-interventionist methodology of qualitative research, via literature review and case study analysis, selecting these cases based on their current and immediate commercial availability and/or potential licensing options, and their grounding on ongoing or recently published research.