I released Burnaby Stencil on October 11, 2007. The design was built to resemble urban stencil lettering, compact and deliberately crude. I began with a conventional digital draft, using superelliptical forms that reflected my drawing approach at the time. Before adding any texture, I introduced irregularity by manually offsetting rotation angles and creating ligature pairs to reduce uniformity.

Once the clean version was finished, I developed the spray paint effect in Photoshop. I built a system of layered textures, each offset slightly to avoid visible repetition. One layer used tiling difference clouds to create uneven areas of light and heavy coverage, so each glyph had natural variation. After this process, the textured outlines were autotraced and cleaned for final use.

On June 15, 2021, I issued an update that reduced file size, which made the font load more quickly in browsers. The update also included the removal of deprecated characters, corrections to the ellipsis width, outline refinements, and vertical metric adjustments for better cross-browser compatibility. For desktop users, the changes were less noticeable. While I haven’t seen it appear in notable projects, it sold steadily.