Design Your Own Text Stencil Online: How Our Stencil Designer Works

Ordering a lettering stencil used to mean sending us your wording, waiting for us to work out the sheet size, and waiting again for a price. For text-only jobs, that back-and-forth is now gone.

Our Custom Text Stencil Designer lets you type your wording, pick a font and a letter height, and see the actual sheet we will cut — with the price updating as you type. This is what it does, how the pricing works, and where its limits are.

What you are actually setting

Nine controls, and every one of them changes the sheet.

Letter height means capital height. This is the single most common misunderstanding in stencil ordering. If you set 100mm, the capitals are 100mm — a lowercase e will be shorter, and a descender on a g will hang below. Fonts with a lowercase alphabet accept lowercase, and the designer tells you which ones do.

The preview is the sheet, not a mock-up

The preview is dimensioned, and it shows two numbers: the sheet size, and the design area inside it. That distinction is the whole point.

Type NO PARKING at 100mm capitals with a 100mm margin, and the design area comes out at 983 × 100mm — but the sheet you receive is 1183 × 300mm, because the border wraps all four sides. A 1.2 metre sheet for two words is not a mistake; it is what a stencil with a usable overspray border actually measures.

Seeing that before you order is the difference between a stencil that fits the wall you had in mind and one that does not. It also removes the most annoying surprise in stencil work — the sheet arriving considerably larger than the lettering suggested.

Bridges are handled for you

Every enclosed shape in a letter — the counter inside an O, A, P, D, R, 8 or 4 — has to stay attached to the sheet, or it drops out the first time you lift the stencil. The connections that hold it are bridges, and they are the reason a stencil font looks the way it does.

The designer adds them for you. Every font in the library is either a true stencil face with bridges built into the letterforms, or is bridged during file preparation. Our minimum bridge width is 1.8mm regardless of material — below that they survive the laser but not the handling and cleaning. If you want the detail, our guide to why stencils need bridges covers where they go and why.

The practical consequence: at small letter heights, heavily bridged decorative fonts start to lose their shape, because the bridges take up a larger proportion of each character. If your wording is going on at 50 or 60mm, choose one of the plainer faces.

Twenty-eight fonts, and how to think about them

The library is broader than a traditional stencil catalogue, and it splits into rough groups.

Yes, Comic Sans is in there. People ask for it, so we cut it.

How the price is worked out

Stencils are priced on sheet area, not on how many letters you typed. The designer prices the sheet it is showing you, rounded up to the nearest 20cm².

That is worth understanding, because it changes how you order:

• A narrower margin makes a real difference. Dropping from a 100mm border to 40mm on that NO PARKING sheet removes 120mm from both dimensions. If you are taping the stencil down anyway, you may not need the wider border.
• Two lines are usually cheaper than one long one. Stacking wording reduces the width and adds a little height, and area is what you pay for.
• Letter height drives cost more than character count. Going from 100mm to 200mm capitals roughly doubles both dimensions.
• Quantity is the cheapest way to buy spares. The same sheet run twice avoids a second order, second freight and second wait. Site stencils get damaged.

For a full breakdown of what stencils cost across materials and sizes, see our 2026 pricing guide. For choosing between materials, the material comparison scores all of them on reuse, flexibility and edge crispness.

Where the designer stops

It does text. For everything else, there is a better route:

• Logos, symbols or artwork — use custom stencils and upload the file. We prepare the cut file, add bridges and send a proof. Our guide on turning a logo into a reusable stencil explains what makes artwork cut well.
• Capitals over 300mm — that is mural and floor-marking territory. See large custom stencils. We cut Mylar up to 1400mm wide and continuous in length, and tile anything wider across registered sheets that align when laid out.
• Individual letters and full alphabets — if you want each character on its own sheet so you can compose wording on site, order an individual letter, the A–Z set or the 0–9 number set. Cheaper than one long sheet if the wording changes.
• Adhesive vinyl, or a genuine one-off — email us. Vinyl gives the crispest edge on textured surfaces, and cardstock costs less when reuse is irrelevant.

What happens after you order

Nothing changes at our end. We prepare the cut file, send a digital proof for approval within one to two business days, and cut and dispatch within two business days of you approving it. Priority cutting and express shipping are available if you are holding up a job.

Free shipping Australia-wide on orders over $99, everything tracked. Cut in our workshop at Eatons Hill in north Brisbane.

Have a go

The designer is free to use and needs no account — type your wording into the Custom Text Stencil Designer and see what the sheet looks like before you commit to anything.

If your job is not text, or you are not sure which material to order, tell us three things — the surface, the paint system, and how many times you expect to use it — and we will tell you what we would order. Email info@tinkable.com.au or call 0418 873 436, Monday to Thursday 9:00am–5:00pm and Friday 9:00am–1:00pm AEST. Quotes are free and there is no minimum order.