Anthony Cahalan was formerly Deputy Head of the School of Design and Architecture at the University of Canberra, where he remains Adjunct Professor of Graphic Design. He famously gave his typography lecture Interogating Type for the AGDA World Graphic Design Day lecture in 2006 before leaving to take up the position of Dean of the Faculty of Design at Canada’s largest university of art and design, the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto.

This lecture lead to a number of interviews with Alan Saunders for the ABC program ByDesign. One of which proved its popularity by being replayed as part of the 2008–09 summer season of ByDesign.

Dr Anthony Cahalan has broad-ranging national and international experience in graphic design, marketing, public relations and design education. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Charles Sturt University. He has been the country delegate for Australia of Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), and state president and national councillor of the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA). He studied visual communication at Sydney College of the Arts, has a Master of Design from the University of Technology Sydney and completed his PhD in typography at Curtin University of Technology in Perth.

His PhD thesis is titled: Type, trends and fashion: A study of the late 20th century proliferation of typefaces. The study is one of the first PhDs in Australia in the field of typography and investigates the impacts this phenomenon of an estimated 100,000 typefaces is having on graphic design practice and typeface design. The focus of the study is on Western alphabet typeface design and typefaces as artefacts (both for text and display) rather than the broader area of typography. The study also focuses on the graphic design profession and experienced users of typefaces, rather than the use of typefaces within the general population of computer users. The thesis has been published as a book and is available from Mark Batty Publisher in New York. Dr Cahalan has written widely on typography in journals and magazines and has presented at numerous national and international conferences on design and typography.