The Fortune 500 in 1972: 116 consumer products in one beautiful collage
Everything, everywhere, all at once.
This 1972 gate-fold cover collage was created by Walter Allner, the Bauhaus-trained graphic designer who was art director of Fortune magazine from 1962 to 1974. It was photographed by Robert Crandall.
Allner went around his own home and said, “What are the objects that I have in my house that represent Fortune 500 companies?” He wanted to show us how these companies are so embedded in our day-to-day life. You could look at it for hours—and I don’t think it matters whether you’re a designer or you’re into art, because it’s these brands that are so familiar and so top-of-mind: Skippy peanut butter, Carnation, Beech-Nut, Cheerios, Dixie cups, Q-Tips. He used pills in groups of five (with one group of six), to represent each of the companies. I counted a total of 116 companies.
Back then, these American brands were mostly being manufactured and consumed here. Fast-forward, and with globalization that’s not necessarily true anymore—some of the materials are being sourced from overseas, or they’re being entirely manufactured overseas. And now you can get Hershey bars all over the world.
Allner was born in Germany in 1909 and studied at the Bauhaus, the legendary German design school, in the 1920s, before it was closed by the Nazis. He studied typography, poster design, and painting for three years under Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.
At Fortune, Allner designed 79 covers, and his Bauhaus-influenced style was generally simple—geometric shapes and primary colors. Allner was the first person to use an oscilloscope to design a cover—the first computer-generated national magazine cover—for the Fortune 500 in 1965.
There’s nothing Bauhaus about this 1972 cover: It’s too complicated, it’s too busy, there are too many colors, there’s no geometry to it. It feels like a complete departure. But that was Allner’s brilliance.
Click the cover image to view it larger.
This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Everything everywhere all at once.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
