soft coating 202 may be between about 100 and 200 angstroms thick to be sufficient to ensure the adhesion of hard coating 204 to acrylic substrate 206 in one example tests showed that stretched acrylic substrate 206 with a thick soft coating 202 on the order of 4 microns performed well in wear tests referring again to fig2 in one exemplary embodiment stretched acrylic substrate 206 is first treated and coated with soft coating 202 in this embodiment soft coating 202 includes a 4 micron thick polysiloxane based adherent transparent coatings next a silicon based transparent hard coating 204 for example diamondshield is deposited on the soft coated acrylic substrate 206 using an ion assisted plasma process the deposition process includes using silicon containing precursors such as hexamethyldisiloxane and oxygen the plasma cvd conditions such as gas flow deposition pressure plasma power and the like may be optimized to produce hard transparent coatings in accordance with well known plasma cvd principles in one embodiment acrylic substrate 206 prior to being loaded into a vacuum chamber for the application of hard coating 204 may be first chemically cleaned to remove contaminants such as hydrocarbons and other undesirable materials the cleaning process may be accomplished using for example ultrasonic cleaning in solvents or aqueous detergents once the desired vacuum conditions are obtained substrate 206 may be sputter cleaned using inert ions and or oxygen ions once the cleaning step is complete the hard coat application can commence in one embodiment for example in window applications hard coating 204 may be between 4 and 5 microns thick with no intent to limit the present invention to validate the improved performance of duplex coating 200 versus.