Commercial Art
A textbook published by The Southwest Press in Dallas in 1930 for art students and for buyers of commercial art. It skips drawing basics and teaches drawing for reproduction and selling.
What it is
A textbook published by The Southwest Press in Dallas in 1930 for art students and for buyers of commercial art. It skips drawing basics and teaches drawing for reproduction and selling. Ten parts cover the job, the customer's viewpoint, selling your work, analysing the problem, layout, technique, hand lettering, the Ben Day shading process, line etchings and half-tones, and drawing for colour, followed by the American Photo-Engravers Association glossary. Its core claim is that a commercial drawing is one unit among type, ink, paper and press work, so the artist must know where and how it will print: heavy lines for newsprint, finer work for 150-line magazine screens, blue pencil to mark Ben Day tints, drawings made a third to a half larger than the plate. It also advises asking what the drawing is for, showing samples in the prospect's own line, and delivering work flat and clean.
Why read it now
The production chapters are history; zinc etchings, silverprints and Ben Day films are gone. The thinking around them has held. Cahoon's rule that a drawing is judged inside the finished ad, not on its own, is the case for designing in layout and in context, and his warning that customers will order work that fails once printed is still why a designer should ask where an asset will run before starting. His advice to design for the medium's worst output, newsprint then, applies to phone feeds and compressed WhatsApp images now. The selling advice is sound and specific: listen more than you talk, find out the purpose, and show a prospect work from his own category, which is how agencies pitch today. What has dated: the idea that good pictures need no salesmanship, the assumption that a square layout rarely works, and a view of price as whatever a rival would charge, which ignores the work's value to the client. Use: when briefing a designer, name every placement and the smallest size it will appear at, then review the design at that size before approving it.
Passages worth keeping
A commercial drawing, it must be remembered, is but a means to an end.
الرسم التجاري لا يُصنع ليُعلّق في معرض، بل هو جزء من إعلان يضم الحروف والحبر والورق، ونجاحه يقاس بنجاح الإعلان كله.
Be a better listener than talker.
الإصغاء إلى العميل يكشف مشكلته الحقيقية ويولد الفكرة المناسبة، والكلام الكثير لا يفعل ذلك.
Your prospect is not interested in you, his interest is in your drawing, it must speak to him.
العميل لا يهمه تاريخ الفنان ولا مدحه لعمله، بل يهمه أن يرى العمل نفسه يخدم تجارته، فعلى العمل أن يقنعه وحده.
An advertisement is a silent salesman and must perform in the same way, in a subtle manner.
الإعلان يؤدي عمل البائع دون كلام، فيجب أن يكون تخطيطه بسيطًا واضح الغاية كما يخطط البائع الجيد حديثه نحو هدف واحد.
It is much more difficult to express the thought in a few lines than in many.
البساطة الظاهرة في الرسم ثمرة حذف طويل، والتعبير بخطوط قليلة أصعب من التعبير بخطوط كثيرة.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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