twen (selected pages) issue 2 1961

Designs for the printed page / 1959

If you looked through those graphic design monthlies of the fifties and sixties, especially the yearly design annual from CA Magazine you would frequently see brochures and booklets promoting Time/Life magazines.  I always thought Fortune produced some wonderful material.  In those days the company had plenty to spend so designers could go creatively wild, use any printing technique, paper and production. 
     Designs for the printed page is a good example of creativity and expense. The forty-eight page book (printed on an eighty pound gloss) is the same size as the magazine (eleven by ten inches) with a thick fold-out card cover and it came in a board container.  The colored arrow on a white square is stuck on one side.  It was designed by Fortune’s Art Director Leo Lionni who wrote a short introduction, part of which says: One purpose of this book is to remind advertisers that design is a seemingly inexhaustible source of visual excitement.  A page of the fold-out cover had captions giving a brief interpretation of each design and how it might apply to a company’s advertising

Two alphabets from the Sixties

Here are two alphabets that I’ve kept for years.  The first was used by the Saturday Evening Post circulation and marketing folk in 1960.  I only ever saw it used by the Post for house ads in the weekly and mailing shots and as it is only the basic alphabet (instead of over a hundred characters in a complete one) I think its use was exclusive to the Post.   As a typeface it’s nothing special, just look at the caps and numerals but what intrigued me at the time was the rather unusual lowercase.  Because it has quite short ascenders and desenders (just like the McDonald's logo) it can be stacked in a multi-decked headline quite tightly, look at: the All-American brands spectacular. Like most display faces it really doesn’t work for text setting as you can see in the text blocks below.  I wonder if it was loosely based on Fiedler Gothic designed by Hal Fiedler for Photo-Lettering, New York in the late Fifties. 

     The other alphabet is one I designed in 1967 and was based on the idea of making all the cap letters as near as possible square.  Sort of a hopeless idea, especially for the I and M.  I convinced Paul Bailey, the owner of Lettergraphics in Los Angeles, to add it to their photosetting collection (the page is from their type book) and he had the lower case, numbers and punctuation designed.  It’s none too readable though it could work for a logo using two or three letters.  The only time I saw it used was a headline in Playboy.