Blackwell Reference Online

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Advertisements organize typography and art (photographs, illustrations, and graphics) into designed layouts. Advertising's visual characteristics can be described historically by analyzing their style, or functionally by analyzing their role in advertising rhetoric (→  Advertising ). Modern advertising appeared during the Industrial Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, most ads, like the goods they promoted, were locally produced. Written in a news style and set in type like today's want ads, they verbally described the attributes, availability, and price of a product or service. They were seldom illustrated. Occasionally small, crude linecuts that showed the product and complemented the copy were employed (→  Advertising, History of ). As the Industrial Revolution progressed and markets expanded, businesses began to compete visually to distinguish their products. Some tried typographic strategies such as bigger, decorative type, printing ads larger, and reiterating the product's name in text type (→  Typography ). Others employed multiple type styles, ornaments, rules, and illustrations in a single ad, creating the cluttered, eclectic look called Victorianism. Textual hyperbole exaggerated brand claims to be the “best,” “first,” “most perfect,” etc. Sophisticated illustration first came into advertising in full-color lithographic →  posters and advertising trade cards ... log in or subscribe to read full text