I’ve noticed that in modern times, there have been distinctive trends in graphic styles, especially those used commercially. I was wondering if these had specific names or official standards or definitions to them. Here is a description of some of them:
In the 40s and early 50s, before photography became ubiquitous in ads, advertising and stock illustrations tended to be fairly realistic oil (?) paintings. Faces tended to all kind of have similar features, though. Men tended to have chiseled features, women had full, heavily-made up eyes and lips, and prominent cheeks. They basically were painted the same as pinup girls, but without the “sexy” elements (it is my understanding that at least some of these commercial paintings were done by an artist who also painted pinup girls). See here for an example.
Later during the 50s, though, a less defined, more minimalist style became very popular. A modern imitation of the style, but one that’s very spot-on, is to be found here. It influenced animation (think for example of the Pink Panther) and varied a lot from artist to artist, but at times could be rather bare-bones and look rather low-effort. If a person was drawn, their features could be very simplified, for example by not drawing distinctive hair on a man, or by not putting a line or different colors between the pants leg and the shoe, making them look like one piece. This style lasted into the 60s and 70s. Examples of the use of this style are different old Sesame Street cartoon shorts or (a slightly less minimalist example) Al Jaffee’s cartoons in Mad Magazine.
A different style which I have noticed in illustrations from the 70s and 80s makes use of fairly simple line drawings which, however, imitate the profile and proportions of people quite realistically. For example the effect of shine may be achieved by drawing a “circle” an appropriate spot. Sometimes, the lines of different segments of the illustration may be rather fluid and not perfectly connect. Most of the examples of this graphic style that I can think of are Canadian, so maybe it was something of a local style. Here is an example from a mid-70s printed material of the Toronto Transit Commission. (This picture could never be published today; all the people in it are vanilla-white and Toronto is now an ethincally diverse city with a large Asian population, as well as Middle Eastern, Indian, Black, etc.)
Now we get to the 90s, the last decade before computer-generated art became completely dominant. This is a decade where oil pastel illustrations seem to have been very popular in illustrations. They were often used for caricatural pictures (e.g. for the “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” books), but also for serious art, such as these illustrations for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from 1990, artist Gary Kelley.
Do these or any other broad graphic styles used in advertising, illustration, etc. have set names, belong to an official school, etc., or are they just individual styles that happened to be more or less popular at some time?