Press Quaternary a working type studio. Bríd Halloran sets letters that refuse to sit still.
A typeface is a verb, not a noun.
Pull the axes. The word reads Restless by design — that is the point of a variable face.
Quaternary Grotesque
Six masters on one weight axis, one width axis, one optical size. Drawn 2024–2026. Latin Extended, set here at the sizes it was made to do work at.
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Thin · 240
Hairlines hold at billboard size.
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Book · 340
Reads quiet in a paragraph, loud on a wall.
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Medium · 480
A working middle, for captions and credits.
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Semibold · 620
Where a headline starts to push back.
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Black · 800
Set it once. Let it shout.
- Character set
- Latin Extended-A · 642 glyphs
- Figures
- Lining, oldstyle, tabular, fractions
- Axes
- Weight 200–800 · Width 75–100 · Optical 12–96
- Format
- Variable OTF · WOFF2 · one file
Concrete poetry
The shape carries the meaning. Below: “Rain on the Lee,” set so the lines fall the way the rain does — typography as the picture, not its caption.
Rain on the Lee, a concrete poem. The words fall down the page in slanting lines, faster and heavier toward the bottom, where they pool into the single word: river.
Broken-grid posters
A twelve-column grid is a promise. I keep it just long enough that breaking it means something. One element always crosses the line on purpose.
OFF THE GRID
Poster reading: Off the Grid — a night of new typography, Triskel Arts Centre.Fri 14 March · 8pm
Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street
Selected work
Eleven years, set in a ledger. Type design, identities, poster series, and the occasional book — each with whoever commissioned it.
- 2026 Quaternary Grotesque Variable typeface · self-released
- 2025 Rain on the Lee Concrete poem · Cork Midsummer
- 2025 Off the Grid · poster series Identity & print · Triskel Arts Centre
- 2024 Strand & Marsh Bespoke wordmark · a saltmarsh distillery
- 2023 The Compositor’s Almanac 204-page book · designed & typeset
- 2022 Marsh Mono Monospace family · for a print zine
Set by hand, in Cork.
I draw type, set poems into shapes, and make posters that argue with their own grid. Most of it starts on tracing paper and ends as one variable file. I take a few commissions a year — identities that need a face nobody else has, and print that wants to be read across a room.