I designed THD_STENCIL for internal use at The Home Depot. It's built to complement Helvetica Neue — the backbone of our brand — particularly the weights that show up most often across signage, print, and digital. The goal wasn’t to reinvent anything, just to offer typography that expands what we can do with internal-facing design, and looks like our present voice.

Working in Illustrator, I started by placing strokes across all characters where I wanted the stencil cuts to occur. This allowed me to tweak the weight of these cuts while viewing the full set at a glance. Zooming in and out, I played with the rhythm and balance of the entire font, while working out issues I discovered in individual letters.

For instance, the capital R in heavier weights of Helvetica Neue has always bothered me. There’s this tiny swashbuckling tip pointing out from the descender. Almost like it’s wearing bell bottom pants. Great fashion choice, depending on context… but for a typeface lauded as the “most universal font” in the modern world, this detail always seemed out of place to me. I appreciate the hidden complexities of a properly developed font, but in this case, I couldn’t help but make adjustments.

We might feel an impulse to grab stencil fonts from free online resources and use them in decks, sharepoint, etc. It’s a cool idea, but these fonts always feel off-brand, somehow the wrong voice for the culture.

Aside from intangibles, the most common problem with stencil fonts is legibility, even when only using them for 2-5 word headlines. Much of the issue lies in the way the letter is cut up so that if it were an actual stencil it would perform as such in real world application: holding together as a mask, and staying flat while paint is applied or sprayed over the stencil.

I wanted to strike a balance between potentially working as a real stencil, while making legibility a higher priority. Using strokes I could scale and reposition helped me to achieve that balance. I knew I could achieve this to some degree if I got the thickness of the cuts adjusted to am optimum right thickness that achieved both A.) recognition as a stencilfont and B.) enhanced legibility.

So, this stencil is clean, legible, and meant to feel at home in the world of orange aprons, hardware, and lumber of Home Depot. But unlike most stencil fonts, it doesn't fall apart. I wanted to keep the letterforms readable even at a glance, without over-fragmenting them.

THD_STENCIL is available as an OpenType file (.OTF) and was built using Fontself Maker 3.5.8 — an Illustrator plugin that makes it surprisingly easy to generate fully functional font files directly from vector artboards. It’s designed strictly for headline or display use, not long-form text. The kerning tables are not refined, meaning letterspacing is intentionally simple, optimized for use in short phrases or title blocks.

Associates can access the font on the Rich Content Sharepoint. (Internal use only.) For now, I’ve just been dropping it into slides and side projects here and there. If it starts showing up in unexpected places around the company, I’ll know the seed took root. : )