GRAPHIC DESIGN From élite to usual - The automobile was not merely a fast moving modern monster. Little by little it lost its patina of luxury and it was revealed as a practical and useful means of transport. The idea shone through a certain number of European ads in which car and driver were de-mythologized and rendered more approachable, but this approach found its most coherent and convincing expression in American advertising. And indeed it is logical that we would find a more balanced message in a country where the automobile was already the means of the many, was in fact at the center of a civilization whose great distances were connected by motor vehicles; a message that did not use illustrations to highlight refinement at all costs, but which was posed in more strict relation to the text; which worked in less explicit but more profound ways on the imagination of the consumer. This idea of advertising would become widespread also in Europe, coming at different moments to different countries, and was affirmed definitively after the Second World War. Meanwhile, the irresistible momentum of photography brought it up alongside the ad illustration. 4/4