Cartier was Canada’s first roman text typeface, created in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s centennial. Its designer, Carl Dair, was one of the country’s most celebrated graphic design pioneers, and a fine designer indeed — but he was not a trained type designer. He had spent a year at the Enschedé type foundry and printing works in the Netherlands, but that probably wasn’t enough to fully grasp all that was required to make an effective text face. It is also possible that Dair simply compromised his own design by not allowing any of the much needed alterations to be made to his working drawings when they were handed over to Linotype for production.

Cartier, though a strikingly original oldstyle, never became the influential allround text face it might have been. A display typeface derived from it, Raleigh, was more successful.

Realizing that Dair’s design was sound in concept, if not in execution, Rod MacDonald began working on a new digital version in 1997. The final family is convincing proof that Cartier could have been the functional text face that Dair originally wanted.