Style combination · Contrasts
Flash Vector Cartoon × UPA
Same limited-animation logic, but hand-painted, off-register and spare; set against mechanical vector lines and tweened puppets.
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.
Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) UPA & Cartoon Modern
- Type from Flash Vector Cartoon
- Colour from UPA
- Form from Flash Vector Cartoon
- Composition from Flash Vector Cartoon
- Surface from UPA
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Flash Vector Cartoon avoids misregistration & overprint: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Flash Vector Cartoon
Hello
Pixelify Sans, standing in for Bitmap-emulating pixel fonts made to stay crisp at small sizes in Flash (e.g. Craig Kroeger's Miniml) for interface text such as preloaders, menus and buttons
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 UPA, with a counter-accent from Flash Vector Cartoon. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) UPA & Cartoon Modern
-
#1c1c1cground · 36% -
#f1e8d2ink · 14% -
#d8a32baccent · 18% -
#ff3333accent · 14% -
#66cc33accent · 10% -
#2e8c87accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #1c1c1c;
--ink: #f1e8d2;
--accent-1: #d8a32b;
--accent-2: #ff3333;
--accent-3: #66cc33;
--accent-4: #2e8c87;
--font-display: "Pixelify Sans", monospace;
--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 Flash Vector Cartoon
- Zagreb School of Animated Film Contrasts · Textured, earthy, modernist art-house shorts against the even strokes, gradients and portal irreverence of Flash.
- Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Pairs well · Shares the ironic, communal portal humour; add MS Paint crudeness and Impact captions for a rougher meme strand.
- Early Web Vernacular Pairs well · Its native habitat: put the cartoon in a cluttered portal page of banners and visitor counters for the full dial-up context.
- Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics) Pairs well · Both run on rounded, pie-eyed figures; borrow its period title lettering for an Old-Timey parody like Homestar Runner's.
- CalArts Style (Rounded Cartoon Character Design) Pairs well · Direct precursor: both build flat-vector, rounded characters with even strokes that a crew can redraw and tween; this style adds sliver or dot eyes and softer, thinner-limbed proportions.
- Flash-Era Web Design (Flash Portfolio Sites) Contrasts · Made in the same tool at the same time, but the cartoon is bright, loose and character-led, where the portfolio site is dark, gridded and abstract.
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.
- 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.