Sans-serifs, especially traditional gothics, dominate the romans in advertising in this printer’s trade magazine.

Leaving the field of consumer magazines for a change, this month we take a look at a trade periodical, and perhaps to make the point more interesting, one devoted to the printing industry. Examining 60 full-page ads, we find that, unlike the consumer magazines, the sans-serif types completely dominate the romans. For text composition, 24 ads were set in eight different roman types, while 33 ads utilized seven sans-serif faces. In the display types there was an even greater discrepancy between the two styles, as but 10 romans were used in 17 ads, against 16 different sans-serif faces in 39 ads.

It may be noted that, typical of the trend in sans-serif types, which has been continuing for a number of years, most of the styles used were the more traditional gothics rather than the modernized form, perhaps best represented by the Futura type pattern. Surprising factors concerning the number of roman types used for body matter are the omission of Bodoni and the number of oldstyle types being limited to but a single style, with all of the romans being 20th Century designs.

Display Types

Text Types

This article first appeared in the “Typographic Scoreboard” column of the March 1966 issue of The Inland Printer.