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Charles Hasler was a typographer and graphic designer and played a significant role in many high-profile exhibitions, displays, poster campaigns and book publishing in Britain from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s. His main areas of knowledge and expertise lay in typography and printing techniques (including photography) and to a lesser extent book binding. Throughout his career Charles Hasler lectured in typographic design and history and was involved with the education and professional development of print and graphic designers.
Hasler trained during the early 1930s at the University of London Goldsmith's College School of Art and at the Sir John Cass Institute and Westminster School of Art as well as taking some courses at the London County Coucil. After 4 years war service, he was from 1942 to 1951 an exhibition designer for the Ministry of Information and the Central Office of Information working on displays such as 'Dig For Victory', Make Do and Mend' andNation and the Child'. He was also involved with the travelling displays on the exhibition ship the Campania. After the war Hasler was a senior designer and chairman of the Typographic Panel for the Festival of Britain of 1951. Involved with providing guidelines for standardised typographical styles for signage and for the official publications for the Festival, he designed and produced the influential Specimen of Display Letters for use by Festival architects and designers. He specifically worked on `The Sea and Ships' display.
He then worked as a freelance designer producing posters for the British Transport Commission from the 1940s to the 1960s, during which time he was also a consultant for the printing company Waterlow & Sons Ltd for whom he designed their housestyle. He also designed covers, layouts and occasionally contributed articles for publications such as The Penrose Annual, Architectural Review, and The Complete Imbiber (vols 4 - 12, 1961-1971) for Vista Books, and various companies' trade literature as well as many smaller commissions for company logos. He wrote and published articles about typography and printing technique (both contemporary and historical, particularly Victorian colour printing) and in 1979 his The Royal Arms: its graphic and decorative development, a comprehensive work on the development of the styles and decoration of crests in Britain, was published by Jupiter Books. He passionately collected source material in all of these areas the most general of which remain in his archive at MoDA.