Jorge Frascara
 Jorge Frascara was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1939. The son of a journalist and a poet/painter, he studied Fine Arts and Art Education in Buenos Aires and began his professional career as an illustrator and film animator in the early ‘60s. Broad interests in culture, art, design, education, psychology and communication, led him in different directions of enquiry during his 20s and early 30s. After almost a year of work in Guatemala in 1973, he spent the academic year 1973/74 in London—with a small grant from The British Council—doing research on graphic design education. Amongst the many people he met, two meetings were of fundamental importance: one with Herbert Spencer, that prompted Frascara to adapt Spencer’s methods for field research in legibility to other areas of communication design; and another with Patrick Burke (then editor of Icographic magazine) and Marijke Singer (then Secretary General of Icograda), that led to a long relation with the International Council of Graphic Design Associations.

Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Frascara organized a meeting with other colleagues and founded the first Society of Graphic Designers of Argentina. In 1974 he coordinated the public information symbols test station in Buenos Aires at the invitation of the ISO, and began to do field research in communication design. Notable was a study on children’s preferences for illustration styles, presented at the Edugraphic conference in Edmonton in July 1975, which was subsequently published in Icographic (#13, 1979, pp. 2–5) and in Reading Improvement (C.J. Ladan and J. Frascara, “Three Variables Influencing the Picture Preferences of South and North American Boys and Girls,” (Reading Improvement, 14/2, 1977, pp. 120–28).  

In 1976 he moved to Canada, accepting a one year contract with the University of Alberta, where in 1977 he became continuing academic staff. He was elected member of the National Council of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (1979–81), and was member of the Advisory Committee on Graphic Symbols for the Canadian Standards Council from 1979 to 1990. From 1981 to 1986 he was Chairman of the Department of Art and Design. Around the same time (1979–1983) he was convener of an ISO Working Group on Graphic Symbols for Public Information (ISO TC 145 SC1 WG2). In that capacity he led the development of the ISO Technical Report 7239, “Visual Design Criteria for Public Information Symbols,” that for the first time established frames of reference for the sizing and placing of graphic symbols for public information in public spaces. He also served as Vice President of Icograda from 1979 to 1981, and became President Elect in Dublin, in 1983, serving as President between 1985 and 1987, and serving on the Board until 1989. He was Associate Editor of Icographic Magazine (1981–84) and fostered the development of the discourse on design education as Icograda Chairman in the area, culminating his mandate two years after chairing a meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay, at the Icograda 1997 Congress.           

As conference organizer his first credit is shared with Peter Kneebone and Amrik Kalsi for the Icograda/Unesco conference Design for Development, held in Nairobi, Kenya in 1987. Due to his involvement in communications for traffic safety, he then went on to be co-organizer of the Novice Driver Education Working Conference (Edmonton, 1993), and of Traffic Safety in Alberta (Edmonton, 1998). He was also Co-Chairman of Edmonton ‘95, Charting the Future of Graphic Design Education (Edmonton, 1995, for the Graphic Design Education Association); Chairman of Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections (Edmonton, 1999), and Chairman of Creating Communicational Spaces a conference to be held in Edmonton in May 2003.

He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Design Issues (Carnegie Mellon University/MIT), Information Design Journal (John Benjamins), and Tipográfica (Buenos Aires, Argentina); he is International Fellow of the Society for the Science of Design (Japan). He has also organized several international design education projects, has been advisor and reviewer of several design education programs and has lectured and made presentations in twenty five countries.

He has published several monographs and articles on design and art and design education—fundamentally in Design Issues, the Information Design Journal, and Visible Language—and is the author of several books in English and Spanish: Diseño Gráfico y Comunicación (Infinito, Argentina, 1988), Diseño Gráfico para la Gente: Comunicaciones Masivas y Cambio Social, (Infinito, Argentina, 1997), and User Centred Graphic Design, Mass Communication and Social Change (Taylor & Francis, London and Washington, 1997). He is the editor for Graphic Design, World Views, 25 years of Icograda (Kodansha, Japan, 1990), and of Design and the Social Sciences, Making Connections (Taylor & Francis, in press). He has also produced three major research reports as principal investigator: Research and Development of Safety Symbols (for the Standards Council of Canada, 1986), Traffic Safety in Alberta (for the Alberta Solicitor General and the Alberta Motor Association, 1992), and Profiling the Alberta Driver (Traffic Safety Summit/ Mission Possible, 1998).

He has juried many design exhibitions and competitions and has conducted research with the support of various Canadian organizations. His professional experience includes illustration, film animation, advertising and graphic design, and now concentrates on research and development of visual communications for safety and other social concerns.


Rolf Harder
Rolf Harder was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929. He studied at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts and spent most of the 1950s working as a designer and art director in both German and Canadian ad agencies and design firms. He moved to Montreal in 1959 and opened his own firm, Rolf Harder Design. Six years later he founded Design Collaborative—a graphic and industrial design company with offices in Toronto and Montreal—with three other partners: Ernst Roch, Anthony Mann and Al Faux. In 1972, he was a founding member of Editions Signum and Signum Press, publishers of limited editions of original graphics and books. In 1978, he formed Rolf Harder & Assoc. Inc. in Montreal, and spent the next 20 years working in virtually all facets of graphic design, most notably corporate identities, posters, books and annual reports.

Harder has had long-term relationships with clients in government (including Design Canada, Canadian Wildlife Service, Health and Welfare Canada, and Canada Post—he has designed more than 60 postage stamps); with cultural institutions including The National Arts Centre, The National Gallery of Canada, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and The Montreal Symphony Orchestra; and with a slew of corporations, from The Royal Bank and Consolidated-Bathurst to Northern Telecom and Hoffmann-La Roche.

He has won more than 100 national and international design awards and prizes. He was one of two Canadian designers represented at the 36th Venice Biennale; one of two Canadian winners of the World Logo Design Award (International Trade Mark Centre, Belgium, 1998). His work has been published in magazines and presented in exhibitions throughout Canada and the U.S., Australia, South America, Europe, Russia, Japan and Korea.

Rolf’s work is included in the following permanent exhibitions in Canada: National Archives of Canada; Musée du Québec; Université du Québec à Montréal. In the US: The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; University of New York College at Fredonia, N.Y. In Germany: AGI Archives, Poster Museum, Essen; German Design Council, Frankfurt/M; Die Neue Sammlung, Staatliches Museum fuer Angewandte Kunst, Munich; Museum for Arts and Crafts, Hamburg. In Austria: Design Austria, Vienna. In France: Musée de la publicité, Palais du louvre, Paris. And in Great Britain at The University of Reading, Reading.

“The aim has always been to convey a message clearly, concisely and with originality,” Harder says. “Beyond serving his client's needs, if a designer is to play his part in society, his work should be esthetically satisfying, intellectually stimulating and imaginative—in short, in harmony with human needs. This may be considered his modest contribution toward a more livable and less visually polluted and confusing environment.” He is now semi-retired, and spends much of his time pursuing his second love—painting—in his home in Beaconsfield, Quebec.


Charlie Harris
Bio to come.


Paul Haslip
Born in Hamilton in 1953, Paul has been a prominent member of the graphic design community in Toronto for over 20 years. He received his Fine Arts degree from York University in 1976 and subsequently studied for 2 years at St. Martin’s College of Art in London, England on a Design Canada Scholarship.

Before founding HM&E in 1991, he was senior designer at Elias Marketing & Communications Inc., design director at The Saturday Night Group and associate partner of Hynes, Haslip & Partners.

Paul is actively involved in the design community through his work with the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada. He is past president of the Ontario chapter. He was instrumental in organizing the 25th Anniversary Show for the GDC in 1982 and in 1985 chaired The Best of the 80’s, a national retrospective of design in Canada. In 1985 he was awarded a Fellowship Honour by the Society for his contribution to graphic design in Canada.

As an educator, he has served on the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University and has lectured at the Ontario College of Art, Sheridan College and The University of Toronto.

Paul’s work has won him international recognition, including awards from The Advertising and Design Club of Canada, the Art Directors Club of New York, AIGA, American Center for Design, the Type Directors Club and the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada. His work has appeared in the international design publications Applied Arts Magazine, Communication Arts, Graphis, How, and Idea Magazine. The work of HM&E was profiled in Applied Arts Magazine (May/June 2000).


Bardolf Paul
Bio to come.

Ernst Roch (1928–2003)
Ernst Roch was born in Yugoslavia in 1928 and arrived in Canada in 1953. But it was the years in Graz, Austria, which so influenced his thinking and his work. In addition to receiving an excellent education in graphic design at the Staatliche Scüle fur angewandte Kunst, the rich cultural environment of Europe instilled in him the highest aesthetic standards and the constant striving for perfection which are the hallmark of his work. This training was based on functionalism, where a design challenge was first seen as a problem-solving process emphasizing rational thinking and formal clarity. It was this “international” and “new” graphic design, as it came to be known, which he pioneered in Canada.

Ernst worked for three design firms before opening his own office in 1960, and was the principal and founding member of Design Collaborative in 1965. In 1972 he was a founding member of Editions Signum, a publishing company specializing in limited editions of original graphics, and in 1973 became founding member and president of Signum Press, a book publishing company. The founding of Roch Design occurred in 1978.

His impressive output ranges from trademarks, symbols, posters, and annual reports to complete visual identity programs, from architectural signage systems to thematic exhibitions, from postage stamps and official documents to book design and publishing.

Ernst has been a visiting lecturer at several universities during the last three decades, including the Art and Design School of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Concordia, McGill, and Ohio State Universities, as well as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

To his rational approach, he brings intuition and imagination, and a third dimension, that witty aspect of his design, which makes his best work unique and memorable. The German design publication Novum Gebrauchsgraphik has described his work as “clear, sober, and sensitive.” Prominent Swiss graphic designer and art critic Hans Neuberg has said that in his best work “the definite form consists of a blend of joyful graphic experimenting and intellectual discipline.”

Graphic design is not merely the visualization of information. It is a complex art form where, as Roch says, designers have a social responsibility “to inform rather than mislead, to enlighten rather than frustrate the individual in his daily life.” In his acceptance speech for his honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts in 1988, he pointed out that “the designer has an acute ability to communicate order out of chaos aesthetically, with intellect and wit, and sometimes brilliantly while investing the problem with personality.”

Among his best known accomplishments are the hexagonal symbol and the identity program for the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), the Queen Elizabeth II definitive issue postage stamps (1962–1963), the paper folding kit “Paper Zoo” (1974), the official poster for the Montréal Olympic Games (1976), and the commemorative postage stamps of early Canadian locomotives (1983–1986). He has also organized exhibitions, most notably  “The visual Image of the Munich Olympic Games” in Montréal and Toronto (1972), and the “AGI Posters” (Alliance Graphique Internationale) in Montréal (1982).

His designs have received numerous national and international awards and prizes. They have been exhibited and published extensively in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan, and are in permanent collections in the National Library (Ottawa), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Library of Congress (Washington DC), and the National Poster Museum (Warsaw).

Ernst was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Alliance Graphique Internationale, the AIGA and the International Centre for Typographic Arts. In 1988, he was the first ever graphic designer to be awarded an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in recognition of his professional and artistic integrity and humanism, of his considerable contribution to Canada’s prestige in the field of graphic design, and of his drive and energy in bringing its achievements to international attention.
— article by Michael Maynard from GDC Journal 1, 1993

Ernst Roch passed away on February 21, 2003. With his passing, Canada, and our profession in general, loses one its finest graphic designers. — from a tribute by Rolf Harder in gdc.net.2003


Denise Saulnier
Bio to come.


Gregory Silver
Born (1953) and raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, Greg is the eldest of four boys in a family that, for several generations, had been in the retail ladies wear business. As a youngster working part time in the family enterprise Greg took more interest in the merchandising displays than in his assigned janitorial and delivery duties and got his first taste of commercial design work apprenticing with the store’s professional window dresser. A few years later, while attending the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Greg earned a little extra money dressing windows and setting up store displays for clothing retailers in downtown Halifax.

Greg took painting and drawing lessons from Mrs. Bates around the corner from home; and from Peter Harris, then curator at St. Catharines’ Rodman Hall Art Gallery. He also took as many art classes as possible in high school, and fondly remembers his art teachers Carole Saunders and Shirley Pike. Greg also was interested in music and enjoyed excellent music programs in the local school system, learning to play trombone with the school concert band; taking piano lessons, and for a time, playing keyboards and drums in rock and blues bands.

After high school Greg studied graphic design for one year at Sheridan College. In 1972 Greg transferred to Halifax and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where he enrolled in the Visual Communications program. Here he was greatly influenced by his German and British-schooled instructors Horst Deppe, Hanno Ehses, Tony Mann, Frank Fox, Ludwig Scharfe, and others….and developed a life-long affinity for the International Style. Greg was active in student politics and served as Student Union president, published a campus newspaper, and was a student representative on NSCAD’s Board of Governors.

Greg was fortunate to find a co-op work term placement for college credit with a multi-disciplinary engineering/architecture/planning firm where he was an in-house graphic designer for that firm’s corporate identity, publications and marketing materials. It was not long before his employer asked him to provide similar services for the firm’s clients and he took a year off from his studies to work full time in that capacity, building a small department of young graphic designers, and creating print, signage and exhibit projects for domestic and international clients. In 1974 he returned to NSCAD to complete his degree, graduating in 1976.

During the last two years of school he took on freelance design projects with a local ad agency and other small business clients, and this experience helped to further develop skills in talking about design with clients, selling design services – and in the management of a small design studio. This business started to grow and he was fortunate to convince a recent NSCAD graduate, Denise Saulnier, to help handle the workload. Together they founded Communication Design Group Limited (CDG), and worked as partners in this enterprise for over 30 years. CDG served a growing and increasingly sophisticated regional clientele, with a focus on corporate identity and marketing communications projects, and peaked with a staff of about 25 people. With the advent of international players in the oil exploration business coming to Atlantic Canada there was an emerging local demand for trade show exhibit design expertise, and CDG found itself working in this new milieu. By the early 1980’s CDG had established a separate trade show division, Design Group Displays Inc., offering turnkey display design, supply and services for trade show exhibitors.

Greg returned to academia part time in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, developing curricula for design courses in a new public relations degree program at Mount St. Vincent University, and subsequently lecturing in that program. He also developed and delivered courses on design for business at the World Trade Institute, an initiative of St. Mary’s and Dalhousie Universities in Halifax, and prepared and delivered courses and workshops on strategic use of graphic design for a variety of industries and professions, including architects, lawyers, accountants and craftspeople.

CDG ventured into some other areas that seemed, at the time, to be new territory for graphic designers in the Atlantic region. Working with multidisciplinary teams of architects, landscape architects and planners, Greg was involved in design for the revitalization of historic downtowns and waterfront districts, focusing on design of building facades and their signage, streetscape and environmental graphics, and place-marketing programs. The clients for these kinds of projects were quite different than the usual ad agencies, corporate marketing departments and small business owners – they were ‘communities’ represented by client committees with diverse interests and motivations. Learning to work with these community-centred clients provided opportunities that led to work on cultural exhibition projects. Since the early 1990’s, Greg’s focus turned to exhibition design for interpretive centres and museum galleries, and environmental graphics and signage for parks and hiking trails. At the same time, connections made with international interests brought Greg to China, where he worked for over a decade as a design consultant and advisor to a client involved in manufacturing and distribution of bound print products such as diaries, notebooks, business and school stationery and gift product lines.

Greg became involved with the GDC while still a student at NSCAD, during a time when the Atlantic Chapter was in its formative years. Upon graduation he took a position on the Chapter executive, then served as its Chair – from 1978 to 1981 and concurrently as representative on the GDC National Council. This took place at the time when GDC Chair Walter Jungkind was re-inventing the Society and introducing a new mandate and constitution. Through this experience Greg became more and more involved in the GDC, subsequently joining the National Executive, serving as Vice President, and then serving as national President from 1983 to 1985, with the very capable assistance of his partner Denise. During the 1980’s and 90’s Greg also became involved as a volunteer with a number of community organizations and served as a director of the Halifax Board of Trade; a board member and eventually Chairman of the Board of Governors of his alma mater NSCAD, and executive positions with other not-for-profit social and economic development organizations. In 1985 Greg was honoured to be named a Fellow of the Graphic Designers of Canada.

In 1997 Greg and partner Denise decided it was time for a change in life and workstyle – and to slow things down. They moved to rural Cape Breton and scaled the studio down to just the two of them, with the notion of working more part time than full time, focusing on corporate work in China, and community-based work closer to home. Since that time Greg’s concentration has become more and more on community economic development projects of a cultural nature, and resulted in design/build assignments for a number of interpretive exhibits, small museums, visitor centres, and downtown and waterfront revitalization projects. Greg continues his design practice in a one-man studio under the shingle Greg Silver Graphic Design, at his home in St. Peter’s on the Bras d’Or Lake. Here he also has the environment, friends, and time to pursue his passion for playing the fiddle and sailing his boat Misty Cat.