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In 1967, Canada celebrated its 100th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation. Celebrations in Canada occurred throughout the year but culminated on Dominion Day, July 1, 1967. Planning for the celebrations officially began with the formation of the Centennial Commission in January 1963 and one of the first jobs the commission undertook was a competition, open to all, to design a new logo for the celebration. Predictably, with little experience in this area, the government offered little to no brief for what would make an appropriate design solution or represent Canada. As a result, the culmination of submissions were banal, clichéd and unacceptable.

Following the failure of the design competition, the federal government approached leading typesetting firm Cooper & Beatty (where Allan Fleming once worked and produced the famous CN mark). At this time the design director of the company was Anthony Mann, ably assisted by apprentice and recent graduate of OCA, Stuart Ash. Under Anthony Mann’s direction C&B affiliated with the internationally recognized, and Ottawa based, design firm Paul Arthur+Associates to work on this important project.

The very first step in the process was the creation of the strategic brief, written by C&B and further approved by the Commission. This document proved invaluable as it identified in detail the strategic requirements of the project and the symbolic references that were both appropriate and acceptable in symbolizing Canada. This included confirmation that the symbol could include a maple leaf and 11 elements representing the ten provinces and the Northwest Territories or other elements such as beavers or Mounties. The brief specified that the symbol was to be celebratory, easily applied, and for it to be appropriate for school children to easily construct themselves. With this brief it allowed the development of extensive design explorations conducted by the designers of the two offices — the resident designers at Paul Arthur & Associates at the time being Gerhard Doerrie and Fritz Gottschalk , and Anthony Mann and Stuart Ash from Cooper & Beatty.

The design team developed numerous design solutions and through careful selection, it was narrowed down to one of Stuart Ash’s symbols and one of Gerhard Doerrié’s. These were then proposed as part of a comprehensive presentation to the Centennial Commission, and after that to the Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson. Through this process the government selected Ash’s maple leaf constructed from eleven equilateral triangles. It’s worth noting that this was in fact one of the first times the maple leaf had been officially adopted to represent the country as a formal symbol.

Following the selection of the symbol, Stuart Ash relocated to Ottawa to work at the office of Paul Arthur & Associates who were tasked with the implementation of the identity. It was here that Ash wrote and created the graphics manual controlling the symbols guidelines and graphic use and all formal applications. The manual essentially illustrated how the symbol could be geometrical constructed using the most rudimentary tools available to any school classroom. The simplicity of its construction and ease of its application were the primary reasons for its acceptance, resultant in its wide use and implementation nationwide — ranging from stencilled into sidewalks and planted in flowerbeds, to being cut into people’s hair.

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