Before we had digital cameras and Photoshop, illustrations were commonly used to display products. Here are a few catalog covers we found from the 80s. The drawing style reminds me of Image Comics and the original Transformers cartoon.
Based on the layouts, we only seem to have done a limited run of these illustrations. You can see how some of these drawings were reused in several different covers. The accessories covers, above, got reordered a bit from year to year, but the fixtures, to the right, used the exact same layouts with different backgrounds.
The one on the left seems to make a little more graphic sense because of the different boxes. The cover on the right seems to change perspective for each of the products with no separation. Plus that faucet is also just floating in mid air with a drench shower sunk halfway into the floor.
They are interesting to look at, though, and good examples of the trends at the time. The images also make the washroom fixtures look pretty dynamic, in a jet packs and lasers kind of way. I almost feel like I’ve seen them in the background of X-Men the animated series.
We have a customer in our territory that had Bradley catalogs back to the 1940′s. I don’t know if they still have them or not. This was several years ago.
That’s pretty cool! We’d love to post some of them here if your customer is interested in sharing.