Medium and Managerial Expertise: Orthogonal Drawing and Advertising in T.M. Cleland’s The New Cadillac (1928)

Abstract In the first few decades of the twentieth century, mechanical drawing systems were utilized for advertising and marketing campaigns. This article examines an unremarked on episode of this early history: T.M. Cleland’s illustrations for The Book of Locomobile (1917) and The New Cadillac (1928), a booklet that appeared as an advertising supplement in Scribner’s and the Saturday Evening Post. The examples of advertising design addressed in this article are notable for the designer’s intentional integration of technical knowledge and visual practices of his audience, which was mostly made up of engineers and a growing managerial class. Designing with his audience’s technical and visual acuities as his medium, Cleland’s advertising illustrations took a mechanical ideal and transcribed it into a mercantile ideal that brought a technically informed audience into close harmony with a commercially created order. Importantly, this article contributes to the literature on the history of advertising design by introducing the concept of a beholder’s “skillful interpretation” to investigate an order of technically inflected perception within the context of advertising’s commercialization of attention.