Plus it's just easier to make straight lines with.

hhp

Black text is overwhelmingly popular in advertising because its rich hue suggests the darkness of a hole, sucking the consumer in.

And not, for instance, because it's been the default for 500 years.

And capitals were the default long before that. Has there ever been a time when capitals were out of favor? And are they really, now, more popular than u&lc? I doubt it.

I doubt you could get dental floss through that kerning :-)

That’s the cover of a book which reproduces ads from the 1960s at 100%, so it would be around 8½" x 11".
The kerning is in proportion to the size of type.
It was published in 1984, just about the end of the Tight-But-Not-Touching era.

During the 1960s, American ad copy was written in a (feigned) friendly, second person singular, conversational style.
Headlines were set as if they were blow-ups of body text, to continue that casual, informal theme.
So: paragraph indent, flush left, upper and lower case, like this from 1965:

The asymmetric shapes made by the text blocks are positioned dynamically in the layout, balanced against negative space, in the high modernist manner, creating a flat “abstract” graphic on the surface of the page.
In comparison, all cap headlines are bossy and authoritative.
Easier to create a superficially neat effect, but lacking the sophistication of the ’60s.

Do you think the way graphic designer's see typography is different from how typographers see typography? I think the ALL CAPS style is mostly done by graphic designers because they see the groups of words as rectangles and it looks neat. While typographers see typography more like language that is typesetted so it wouldn't make sense to make everything ALL CAPS.

Black text is popular because that's just a standard color for text

In ads like those, all-caps is quite allright because of the varying weights and sizes. But an all-caps multi-paragraph setting (read: disclaimers) is guaranteed to drive me all "HULK SMASH!!!!!" and demanding that the offender be hung, drawn, quartered and nuked from orbit.

Good graphic design isn't about making a layout beautiful. It's about finding an effective way to visually communicate a message on behalf of a client.

Setting paragraphs of type in all caps is not a good idea in most cases since it's difficult to read, but none of the examples shown do that; they just show a few words in caps, which certainly is nothing new. You can find ads from the 1800s (and probably earlier too) that do the same thing. Is it good design? Depends on the ad.

Point taken, Nick. I didn't phrase it well. Certainly a designer wants his/her layout to be attractive. I'm just saying that good graphic design isn't just a veneer of attractiveness. If a design looks beautiful but does a poor job of communicating the intended message, then on some level it's a failure.

To answer your question about the photo, it does communicate clearly, but obviously it's not an attractive design.

Research shows that when people read, they don't decode the text one letter at a time;

No, research shows that we read letters not words.
As per Kevin Larson, Typophile poster.

I did a wedding invitation similar to this recently - Does this seem like it's shouting in all caps? I feel like I see all caps in wedding invitations often.

Familiar with the Elephant font, but not Blind men.

Has there ever been a time when capitals were out of favor?

In Dessau in the mid-1920s.

I think the typography in the Marlborough ad is rather terrible . I am all for paragraph indents, but not when the paragraph is comprised of one sentence. And then leaving the "is" all alone down there. And then using full sentence punctuation in the first sentence and not in the second.

I think the mad man who set that doesn't have too much on the typesetter for the library letter board. (It is almost centered)

I think the mad man who set that doesn't have too much on the typesetter for the library letter board.

I think you’re missing the point.
There was a culture of this style, with subtleties that this ad plays to.
The orphans are intentional, creating dramatically asymmetric paragraph shapes which may be manipulated as part of the overall flat graphic, in a way that filled-out paragraphs don’t.
In particular in this ad, which is all about vertical flow (riffing off the condensed type style of the brand name), “is” reads straight down to the adjacent “Come”, requiring no disruptive eye backtrack (regressive saccade?)
Continuing the flow, the absence of a final period references newspaper style, easing the reader’s passage into the body copy.

Speaking of vertical flow and Mad Men, the real deal:
http://www.georgelois.com/pages/milestones/mile.coldene.html

Lois would have pissed on anything as lame as “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.”
And still would.

no it isn't.

Thanks Nick, that is a really great description of the era and culture and the design methodology in use. It does make sense if you think of how the designers of the ad were reacting to the way type had been used in the past or the way type was thought of at the time, and setting it in a different way. I actually do understand it as experimental typography now, I guess I was just unaware of what experimental typography of 1960's Madison Ave. looked like. I was definitely drawn to it as a kid looking at my parents old magazines though.

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