Carl Dair

Harris Carleton Dair (February 14, 1912 – September 28, 1967), known as Carl Dair, was a Canadian graphic designer. He left a lasting legacy as a teacher, type designer, design practitioner, and author. Even though he was primarily a self-taught designer, Dair would emerge to win international recognition and codify visual design principles still relevant today.

Dair was born in Crowland Township in Welland, Ontario, in 1912, to William Albert Dair and Bertha Minnie Dair (née White). Dair's first job as an 18-year-old was creating advertising and layouts for the Stratford Beacon-Herald. He would move on to form a partnership with Henry Eveleigh and set-up the Dair-Eveleigh Studio from 1947-51 in Montréal, Quebec. He worked principally as a freelance designer on a variety of jobs from department store art director to the typographic director for the National Film Board of Canada (1945). Dair lectured on typography at the Ontario College of Art between 1959 and 1962, as well as teaching at the Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts for two years.

With the publication of Design with Type in 1952, revised and republished in 1967, he demonstrated a deep understanding of how to design using primarily type and formal design principles. He outlined visual principles of harmony and contrast codifying seven kinds of typographic contrast: size, weight, structure, form, texture, colour, and direction. "Contrast is the opposite of concord; it is based on a unity of differences."Design with Type became the first Canadian book to receive the Book of the Year Award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). It was republished by the University of Toronto Press (First Edition) in 2000.

The period from 1956-57 was extremely productive for Dair when he received the RSC fellowship to study type design and manufacture in the Netherlands. During this period he had the opportunity to study metal type and hand-punching at Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem, Netherlands, where he created a silent film called Gravers and Files documenting "one of the last great punchcutters, P. H. Radisch, demonstrating his craft—it is perhaps the only such film in existence". His experiences at Enschedé were also a formative influence in the typeface, for instance, Dair later created a typeface called Cartier.

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