The first installment of the HMCT Typographer-in-Residence took place from January to March 2016, featuring Laurenz Brunner as Typographer and Jonny Woods as Typography Fellow. During this residency, Brunner developed Dictionary of the Illegible, a research and exhibition project examining the boundaries between what can and cannot be read.

Brunner’s inquiry traced the intertwined histories of writing and image-making — from early brush-made inscriptions to modern digital interfaces — revealing how legibility has always existed in tension with visual abstraction. Through references spanning ancient Roman letterforms, avant-garde movements such as Dada and Lettrism, and the rise of digital communication systems, his work explored the evolution of typographic meaning and form when detached from conventional linguistic structures.

Dictionary of the Illegible also speculated on the future of written communication in an increasingly gesture-based digital world. As physical keyboards and textual interfaces give way to touchscreens, voice commands, and encoded gestures, Brunner proposed that new forms of “writing” may emerge — expressive, gestural, and visual rather than purely linguistic.

By gathering and reflecting on historical and contemporary examples that oscillate between legibility and abstraction, Brunner’s residency highlighted the poetic and conceptual possibilities of typography beyond readable text.