The ethic of American individualism was irrelevant to this service-oriented profession. Graphic design was an adjunct to advertising, used to focus, position, and make an idea or product more appealing. The purpose of design was to shed light on the product, not the designer. In addition to the benign indifference of design directors and practitioners, the commercial art field echoed some of the progressive, yet nevertheless dehumanizing, developments in American industry. Old photographs of art service agencies showing row upon row of mostly men dutifully sitting at their drawing boards suggest a veritable production-line procedure that eliminated the individual’s role in a total creation.