Robert Harling had a long, varied and somewhat self-effacing career as an author, illustrator, typographic designer, scholar, journalist, and magazine editor. He was never well known to the public, but he had a considerable influence on the design of printed material before and after the war.

He was perhaps the most innovative and distinguished typographical designer of the last century — Stanley Morison was more of an historian and adapter of earlier faces — and despite his modesty his influence was profound. He was much influenced by Eric Gill, and his co-operation with the printer James Shand led to a range of typographical journals and books which were visionary at the time and are unequalled today.

Robert Henry Harling’s mother died when he was very young, and he was brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton. He took his first job on a magazine in the late 1920s, and learnt a great deal about editing, design, writing and typography. He spent the 1930s working as a freelance not only for various book and periodical publishers, but also for a Mayfair advertising agency and for the Sheffield typefoundry Stephenson Blake, for which he created three typefaces: Tea Chest, Chisel and the Victorian-style Playbill. At the same time he also wrote two books, Home: A Victorian Vignette and The London Miscellany.

He wrote the first article in Britain about the Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold, which appeared in Printing magazine in 1936, and in the same year he conceived and started a periodical of his own, called Typography.

From an early age he had been interested in architecture and drawing, and he was one of the first of his generation to appreciate Victorian design. The covers of Typography were decorated with large Victorian letters in strong colours, influencing several postwar designers. This enthusiasm was also reflected in his work at Stevenson Blake. In 1940 he also designed the periodical Art and Industry.

As an amateur yachtsman he took part in the rescue from Dunkirk — his book Amateur Sailor was to appear in 1944 under the pen name Nicholas Drew — before serving in corvettes. The Steep Atlantick Stream, published under his own name in 1946, was a moving and tense story of wartime life in a corvette.

In 1941 he was recruited into naval intelligence by his friend Ian Fleming to establish the contacts section. For a time he also served as deputy to Lieutenant Donald McLachlan, a former Times journalist who headed the propaganda section and became Editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 1961.

Harling also served in an assault unit comprising young intelligence staff and a contingent of Marines, whose aim was to capture enemy secrets and new equipment intact. Harling, who joined after a one-man mission in Syria, became the unit’s expert on mines and minefields. On D-Day the unit succeeded in capturing the big German radio installation on the Arromanches beachhead.

Soon after the war Harling and Shand, who ran the Shenval Press, started a publishing venture called Art & Technics. Harling wrote Notes on the Wood Engravings of Eric Ravilious, an artist whose work he particularly admired.

A brilliant typographic designer, he redesigned Time & Tide in 1947 and was responsible for a very lively but short-lived typographic magazine called originally Alphabet & Image. He wrote occasional reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, to which he gave some typographical advice, as he did to The Daily Sketch as it evolved into The Daily Graphic.

He was involved with several other newspapers, most notably The Sunday Times, where he worked part-time for 40 years. He joined in 1945 while still working for an advertising agency, and designed a number of features in the days before the paper had an overall design, as well as coming up with the slogan “One of the world’s great newspapers”. His principles were simplicity, clarity and — in the days when typesetting and illustration were much more cumbersome operations than today — economy.

When Denis Hamilton set up the Colour Section in 1962, it was Harling who recruited the young Mark Boxer (also known as the cartoonist “Marc”) as its editor. He also gave advice to the Financial Times and, after the death of Stanley Morison, to The Times.