Style combination · Pairs well
American Mid-Century Modernism × UPA
Its print parent: Alvin Lustig drew UPA's logo. Both use flat colour, simple shapes and visual wit. Add UPA's caricatured characters and stripped sets to a Rand- or Lustig-style layout when an idea needs a cast of people rather than a single symbol.
Mix them and make something American Mid-Century Modernism UPA
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
American Mid-Century Modernism UPA & Cartoon Modern
- Type from American Mid-Century Modernism
- Colour from American Mid-Century Modernism
- Form from UPA
- Composition from American Mid-Century Modernism
- Surface from UPA
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · UPA
The modern cartoon of United Productions of America (UPA) and the 1950s films, commercials and books it inspired. Former Disney artists who looked to Matisse, Klee, Dufy, Léger and Picasso turned against Disney's illusionism. They flattened character and setting into one plane: caricatures in a clean line, colour laid flat and often slipped off that line, rooms cut to a few shapes on one shade or tilted askew, and limited animation. Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), its drawings likened to Saul Steinberg's, and Mr. Magoo carried the look to Warner Bros., MGM, Disney and television.
Newsreader; UPA used Playful hand-drawn cartoon lettering and Gestural biomorphic display letters
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from American Mid-Century Modernism, with a counter-accent from UPA. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
American Mid-Century Modernism UPA & Cartoon Modern
-
#f2ede1ground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#e2a83aaccent · 18% -
#d6452faccent · 14% -
#2f5f8aaccent · 10% -
#5c7a3eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2ede1;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #e2a83a;
--accent-2: #d6452f;
--accent-3: #2f5f8a;
--accent-4: #5c7a3e;
--font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
UPA & Cartoon Modern: Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing are still licensed characters, and the films are not free to copy. Borrow the method (a flat field, a caricature, colour slipping off the line), never the characters, and do not present new work as a UPA film. Leave out the Asian caricature of Magoo's houseboy Charlie, which was dropped in the late 1960s, and gags that mock disability: blind and low-vision groups, including the National Federation of the Blind, protested the 1997 Magoo film.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With American Mid-Century Modernism
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · Many-faced Victorian crowding versus one idea in open space is a clear demonstration of modernist economy.
- Googie & Atomic Age Pairs well · Both share post-war optimism; combine biomorphic cut shapes with Googie starbursts for retro mid-century branding.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Loosen a Swiss grid with Rand-style cut-paper shapes and a visual pun for modernism with a sense of humour.
- Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism Contrasts · Both made idea-led covers in the same decades, but American modernists composed asymmetric cut-paper shapes and hand-drawn marks in bright flat colours, while Rojo, who found the US and French advertising manuals he could get in Mexico not to his liking, framed one treated photograph or found vignette on white with a fine rule and Bodoni, Baskerville or Futura, ordering the text with printer's ornaments. Choose Rojo when the type should serve the reading rather than play the joke.
- Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Pairs well · Saul Bass's film posters are a favourite model of the alternative movie poster (Film Comment found the Bass homages 'far too plentiful' in 2014); borrow his one cut-paper symbol that holds the whole story.
- Brodovitch Editorial Design (Harper's Bazaar) Contrasts · Rand and Lustig build flat geometric pictograms; Brodovitch builds sequences of grainy photographs.
- Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Pairs well · Its print parent, which already counts Bass among its makers: take Rand's or Lustig's cut-paper wit on the page, and the Bass branch when the single idea has to move, assemble in time and set a mood before a story begins.
- Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad) Pairs well · Combine mid-century flat cut-paper shapes and asymmetry with hand-drawn Bengali lettering for a literary jacket that works in two scripts.
With UPA
- Push Pin Style Contrasts · Its New York contemporary shared UPA's comic, distorted figures and irony but went the opposite way on ornament: Push Pin piled on revived Victorian and Art Nouveau lettering, borders and ornament, while UPA stripped the picture to a figure, a line and a flat field.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both draw cartoon characters in a clean line with flat colour, but the clear line closes every contour exactly and sets its figures in researched, deep, realistic streets. UPA often lets the colour slip off the line and erases the setting down to a single shade or tilts it into skewed perspective.
- Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak) Contrasts · The nearest genome in the atlas, and close kin in animation: critics found that Khitruk's Story of a Crime (1962) looked more like UPA than Disney, and called it a rare example of Soviet cartoon modern design. It shares the limited movement and the set cut down to its props. But Thaw modernism prints a few clear pastel inks on a light ground and aims at civic, Sputnik-age optimism, while UPA sets one or two caricatures on a single, often saturated, flat field, often lets the colour slip off the line and pokes fun at American folkways.
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · A distant flat-figure descendant: both distort the body over flat colour, but Corporate Memphis is faceless, smooth and earnest. UPA often keeps a drawn line slipping off its colour, caricatures people and their movements, and pokes fun at them.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Riso's flat spot inks and loose registration naturally reproduce the divorced line, which suits small-run picture books, posters and zines today.
- Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics) Contrasts · UPA rejected exactly this: it traded rubbery full movement and round bodies for angular caricature, flat modernist sets and limited animation.
- Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) Contrasts · Same limited-animation logic, but hand-painted, off-register and spare; set against mechanical vector lines and tweened puppets.
- French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) Pairs well · UPA's flat, slipped colour and deadpan caricature carry the same good-natured wit into motion; use it to animate a gag poster for screens.