Gunnlaugur SE Briem is a designer and lives in California. His postgraduate studies in Copenhagen and London culminated in a PhD from the Royal College of Art. He also passed, for good measure, an apprenticeship exam at a typography college in Reykjavik in 1989.
He took part in the introduction of cursive handwriting in his native Iceland, where his method and manuals have been used in classrooms for over twenty years. Some are available on his website: briem.net. He is also a member of the advisory board of Visible Language, a research magazine. Additionally, he publishes free e-books on fonts and related subjects at: www.operina.com.
He has designed several fonts for The Economist, The Times, and for general licensing. He has also lectured widely in Europe and America, and was Designer-in-Residence at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990.
He organized traveling exhibitions of lettering and calligraphy and, for a time, ran a calligraphy gallery. He has had several one-man shows of his own work, most recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and has won a few awards.