Wren Halloran

A type designer who visits in week eight to teach script design that works in practice — letterforms you can actually write, quickly and by hand.

Role

Guest lecturer

Affiliation

Visiting, from outside the university

Contact

Available in week eight only, before and after the lecture.

Wren visits once, for the orthography week, and stays for the workshop afterwards.

They design typefaces, which is a trade with a much longer memory than most people expect — the reason certain letters are shaped the way they are is frequently that somebody was working fast with a broad-nibbed pen a thousand years ago, and the shape survived the pen. Their contribution to week eight is the part of script design that linguists tend to skip: what a letterform costs to produce, at speed, by hand, with whatever tool your speakers actually had.

They are the reason the week eight workshop ends with everybody writing the same sentence three times as fast as they can. Students find this a strange exercise for about four minutes and then discover that two of their glyphs have collapsed into each other.