Style combination · Pairs well
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics × UPA
Its Los Angeles neighbour in flat, modern animation: borrow UPA's caricatured cast when a title needs characters, and keep Bass's single symbol and bars when it needs suspense.
Mix them and make something Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics 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.
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics UPA & Cartoon Modern
- Type from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Colour from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Form from UPA
- Composition from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Surface from UPA
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
Hello
Londrina Solid; Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics used Ragged, paper-cut display lettering with a 'subtly jagged imprecision', drawn and cut in the studio and by freelance letterers and Plain sans-serif credits moved as graphic elements
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 Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics, with a counter-accent from UPA. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics UPA & Cartoon Modern
-
#111111ground · 36% -
#efe9dcink · 14% -
#e0461faccent · 18% -
#d8a32baccent · 14% -
#2d4f8eaccent · 10% -
#9a9894accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #111111;
--ink: #efe9dc;
--accent-1: #e0461f;
--accent-2: #d8a32b;
--accent-3: #2d4f8e;
--accent-4: #9a9894;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics: The posters, title sequences, film scores and corporate marks are in copyright, and several logos are still registered trademarks: borrow the method (one cut symbol, a flat ground, bars that assemble in time), never a specific arm, spiral, dissected body or logo, and do not present new work as a Bass design. Credit Elaine Bass and the letterers where the record names them rather than attributing everything to Saul.
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 Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Contrasts · ICAIC's film posters also read a film through one silhouette or pun, but in saturated, clashing screenprint colour for a revolutionary public; Bass keeps to one or two flat colours and black, and the symbol's real home is the moving title.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Contrasts · Hillmann's posters also refuse star portraits and reduce a film to one sign, but they are static sheets set in grotesque type that often find the sign in a grainy photograph; Bass draws and cuts the sign by hand and builds it as a moving title before it becomes a poster.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Pairs well · Bass carried the same reduction to one symbol into the Bell System, Continental and United logos; pair the two when a brand needs an animated mark rather than a static emblem.
- American Mid-Century Modernism 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.
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · The Polish film poster also distorts the body into a metaphor, but paints it in loose brushwork with painterly texture; Bass cuts it into hard, flat paper shapes on an empty ground.
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.
- American Mid-Century Modernism Pairs well · 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.
- 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.