Ruari McLean (1917 - 2006)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

British typographic designer. McLean was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford 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 heavily influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold, the German typographer, and visited him at his home in Switzerland.

McLean joined Penguin Books in 1946, with special responsibility for design of the Puffin range, bringing Tschichold to advise on design. From 1949 he taught at the Royal College of Art, and at the same time became involved with Rev. Marcus Morris in the planning the layout of the new boys’ comic, the Eagle.

In 1951 he entered into partnership with George Rainbird, designing and contributing to high-quality reproductions of bird and flower books, as well as the About Britain guides. By 1958 he went into partnership with Fianach Jardine and resumed general design work. He also edited 13 issues of Motif, a quarterly magazine which incorporated painting and sculpture to its typographical content.

McLean continued as a practising typographer, and contributed to journals and magazines, such as The Observer’s weekend review, The Economist, New Scientist and The Twentieth Century.

Mclean was Typographic Adviser to HMSO from 1966 to 1990. In 1981 he became a trustee of the National Library of Scotland. He was appointed CBE in 1973.

John Randle, ‘Ruari McLean 1917 – 2006’, in Parenthesis; 12 (2006 November), p. 44