Ruari McLean

John David Ruari McLean CBE, DSC (10 June 1917 – 27 March 2006) was a leading British typographic designer.

Ruari McLean was born in Scotland on 10 June 1917, in Newton Stewart, Galloway. He was educated at the Dragon School and Eastbourne College.

He was apprenticed in the printing trade at the Shakespeare Head Press, Oxford, where he worked on limited edition fine books. He went on to train in Germany and at the Edinburgh School of Printing, and worked at Waterlow and Sons Printing in Dunstable, Bedfordshire and at The Studio magazine. In 1938 he joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, later moving to Lund Humphries printing in Bradford, Yorkshire.

McLean was profoundly influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold, the German typographer, and he visited him at his home in Switzerland shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.

During the war, he served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, acting as the British Liaison Officer in the Free French mine-laying submarine, Rubis, where he was in charge of the code books and, after each patrol, had to secretly report to the Admiralty on the morale of the French crew. From 1943 he was attached to Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, involved in daring explorations on enemy beaches in small craft in northern France. He served for more than a year in the Far East, his role being to reconnoitre Japanese beaches in Burma and other potential targets in Sumatra. In 1943 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, having been a recipient of the Croix de Guerre in 1942, and was three times mentioned in dispatches.

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