Flash Vector Cartoon × Internet Ugly

Shares the ironic, communal portal humour; add MS Paint crudeness and Impact captions for a rougher meme strand.

From the research on Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation)

Mix them and make something Flash Vector Cartoon Internet Ugly

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Flash Vector Cartoon, their arrangement from Flash Vector Cartoon, the finish from Internet Ugly. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

Type from Internet Ugly: All caps
Condensed display
Colour from Flash Vector Cartoon: Flat fields
Gradients
Form from Flash Vector Cartoon: Stylised figuration
Rounded & pill
Composition from Flash Vector Cartoon: Sequential narrative
Isolated object
Surface from Internet Ugly: Glitch
Hard offset shadow

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Internet Ugly

Hello

Anton, standing in for Impact (Geoffrey Lee, Stephenson Blake, 1965), set white with a black outline

Text · Flash Vector Cartoon

Short cartoons drawn and animated in Macromedia Flash for the browser and passed around portals such as Newgrounds. Characters are closed vector shapes with flat colour fills and an even stroke, stored as reusable symbols and moved by computer tweening like cut-out puppets, with looping walk cycles and a few mouth shapes. The tone is absurd, ironic or cute-gory, often interactive. By 2002 it was on television (Home Movies, then ¡Mucha Lucha! on US children's TV). Its portal heyday ran to about 2010, and it faded once Flash Player was retired at the end of 2020.

Zen Maru Gothic; Flash Vector Cartoon used Hand-drawn vector title lettering made with Flash's own pen and brush tools and animated with the cartoon, as on title cards and series logos and Embedded TrueType display faces rendered smooth by the Flash Player

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Flash Vector Cartoon, with a counter-accent from Internet Ugly. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

#000000 ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#ff3333 accent · 18%
#fff200 accent · 14%
#66cc33 accent · 10%
#00a2e8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #000000;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #ff3333;
  --accent-2: #fff200;
  --accent-3: #66cc33;
  --accent-4: #00a2e8;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular: Most meme templates are photographs of real people, often children, or licensed stock. Success Kid is Laney Griner's son: the photo has been licensed to advertisers, and in January 2020 she sent a cease-and-desist letter to a congressman whose fundraising campaign used it without permission. Distracted Boyfriend is microstock, and its photographer says use without a proper licence is not allowed. License a template or make a new picture for commercial or political work. Check what a format means now: some characters that spread through 4chan were taken up as hate symbols (the ADL listed Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie's 2005 Boy's Club character, in 2016, while noting that most uses are not hateful). Reaction images of Black people posted by non-Black users and brands read as digital blackface (Lauren Michele Jackson, Teen Vogue, 2017), and deep-fried memes came out of Black Twitter, so credit where formats come from. When brands and campaigns borrow a format, its makers often protest or drop it (Douglas).

The two styles

A brightly coloured comic shows a spiky-haired child taking a giant chocolate-chip cookie from a jar and running away while an angry chef chases him. A large final panel shows the child fleeing with a bitten cookie above the words “COOKIE RUN.”

1997–2020 · North America, Western Europe, East Asia, Global / networked Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) Short cartoons drawn and animated in Macromedia Flash for the browser and passed around portals such as Newgrounds. Characters are closed vector shapes with flat colour fills and an even stroke, stored as reusable symbols and moved by computer tweening like cut-out puppets, with looping walk cycles and a few mouth shapes. The tone is absurd, ironic or cute-gory, often interactive. By 2002 it was on television (Home Movies, then ¡Mucha Lucha! on US children's TV). Its portal heyday ran to about 2010, and it faded once Flash Player was retired at the end of 2020. 2003–present · Global / networked, North America Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular A deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014. Figures are drawn with a mouse in MS Paint, photos are found and crudely pasted together, and captions shout in white Impact capitals with a black outline, top and bottom, or in Comic Sans. Re-saving and 'deep-frying' wear the pixels down. The joke's setup and punchline are the layout, and every template is made for a crowd to copy; some are clean stock photos that only the labels make a meme.