Back for a closer look at the design package that kicked off this blogsite (on September 3, 2012), we’re especially drawn to an ad (from the January, 1931 issue) for office furniture. The furniture itself is totally lacklustre. But the concept is riveting!

“What executive of a few decades ago would have dared admit that beauty and fine taste had their part in a world of dollars and steel and hogs and wheat? But the conception of business has changed. Office surroundings are becoming human, livable, comfortable. Men find that they can think more clearly, work more easily—have broader vision—obtain the accord of others more harmoniously in the hospitable atmosphere of a room such as they would choose to occupy in their club or their home.”

Fortune is not, when all is said and done, a dose of business news and manufactures. But instead, it is a first flush of design excitement on the part of the nouveau riche. Thereby we can fully appreciate the care and expense going into the publication by realizing that we are not dealing with a swatch of design connoisseurs but pragmatists enlisting visual excitement for the sake of money, but also something they would not care to define.

The inside front cover (printed, therefore, on the most color-friendly paper stock) conveys the value of a gasoline additive by way of the vitality mustered by porpoises trailing “your favorite liner.”     Continue reading →