Evening starts off at 6 pm with a social mixer, so grab a drink or a bite to eat and catch up with old friends and make some new ones. Presentation will start at 6:30 pm followed by a Q&A session at the end of the evening.

Carl Dair FGDC (1912–1967)

Carl Dair FGDC, designer and typographer, was born in 1912 in Welland, Ontario. He was essentially a self-taught designer and in 1930 began his career as an advertising layout designer for the Stratford Beacon-Herald. During the 1930s, he worked as a freelance printer and, in 1940, while living in Montréal, Quebec, he worked as a department store art director. He became the typographic director in 1945 for the National Film Board of Canada. Through mutual friends, Dair and Henry Eveleigh met and between 1947 and 1951 they were partners in the design studio Eveleigh-Dair Studio. In 1951, the partners were preparing to take on a third partner and expand when Dair suddenly left Montréal for Toronto, thus severing his partnership with Eveleigh. It was not an amicable split.

Except for a brief time at the Toronto agency of Goodis, Goldburg, Dair, he would never work for anyone except himself. Dair travelled to the Netherlands and Europe between the years of 1956 and 1957, and this experience afforded him the opportunity to study hand punching of metal type at Joh. Enschedé, which led to the typeface “Cartier.” It was to be Canada’s first domestic typeface and was designed as a personal gift to Canada for its centennial.

He achieved international recognition when he received a silver medal at the Internationale Buchkunst-Austellung in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1959. The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts awarded him its Arts Medal in 1962. In 1967, he became a Fellow in the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and died that same year in Toronto, Ontario, on September 28. York University has the Carl Dair Memorial Scholarship for the Department of Visual Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

Over 3 decades, he inspired a generation of graphic designers, not only with standards of excellence in design but with his personal philosophy, which saw “inspired typography” as an important “means of visual communication.” Among his many publications is Design with Type (1952; 2nd ed 1967), now a standard text on the subject.

About the Speaker

Rod McDonald MGDC has over forty years experience working with lettering and type. Much of his career was spent providing hand lettering and typographic styling to the Toronto advertising and design community. He was one of the first typographers to switch to the ‘Mac’ in the mid ’80s and was soon providing custom fonts to ad agencies and design studios. He has designed logos for many of the leading Canadian magazines including Applied Arts, Maclean’s and Toronto Life. He has also created typefaces for these, and other, magazines and corporations. Rod taught typography at the Ontario College of Art & Design and is currently teaching at NSCAD University in Halifax. In addition to the Graphic Designers of Canada, Rod is a member of the Type Directors Club (TDC). He is a founding member of the Type Club of Toronto and an ex-board member of The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SoTA). In 2007 he was a judge at the Type Directors Club TDC2 show in New York. He has twice received the Monotype Imaging Type Design Fellowship. Rod lives in Lake Echo, Nova Scotia where he spends his time working on new typefaces — it’s a tough job — but somebody has to do it.

RSVP

Please note that seating is limited and that GDC members have advanced registration so please RSVP by June 22 to Richard Osborne MGDC: membership.atlantic@gdc.net or by phone: 506 852 3803.