The magazine examined this quarter is Fortune, issue of June 1963. We checked 109 full- and double-page ads for display and text types. Captions, address lines, etc., are not included.

It may be noted that the majority of the advertisements in this business periodical are conservative in design. The sans-serifs, particularly in the traditional gothic styles, completely dominate the roman types for display use, and come quite close in text composition.

If a trend may be noted, it simply is that designers are of the opinion that the top American business executives’ admire the forthright traditional gothic types. Twelve different gothics were used in 56 ads, and these apparently didn’t fill the bill, as another 15 ads contained a variety of gothic forms listed here as hand or photolettering styles.

The most frequently used type for text composition was News Gothic, for 18 ads, while Standard received the most use for display. The gothics were used in 65% of the ads for display and 39% for text.

Display Types

Text Types

This article first appeared in the “Typographic Scoreboard” column of the September 1963 issue of The Inland Printer.