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

This article focuses on the early twentieth-century advertising illustrations by American designer T.M. Cleland for The Book of Locomobile (1917) and The New Cadillac (1928), highlighting his integration of technical drawing systems—specifically orthogonal (orthographic) and perspectival projections—to engage a specialized audience of engineers and managerial professionals. Cleland's designs deliberately incorporated compositional discontinuities between these projection systems to prompt "skillful interpretation," appealing to a managerial class familiar with mechanical drawings and thus fostering a co-productive relationship between designer and informed beholder. His work exemplifies how advertising not only promoted luxury automobiles but also reflected and reinforced the rise of managerial expertise and values within a broader "culture of management," marking a shift from skilled labor to organizational control and inconspicuous consumption of managerial ideals.