Stylogeny combining Flash Vector Cartoon × Zagreb School of Animated Film

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Style combination · Contrasts

Flash Vector Cartoon × Zagreb School of Animated Film

Textured, earthy, modernist art-house shorts against the even strokes, gradients and portal irreverence of Flash.

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

Mix them and make something Flash Vector Cartoon Zagreb School of Animated Film

A vintage-style cartoon poster titled “DRIFT AWAY” shows a small black-and-cream character in a red shirt holding a red balloon against a roughly brushed blue sky. Four panels along the bottom show the character lifting off the ground before the balloon floats away above its reaching hands.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the recipe below, and checked against it: the type from Flash Vector Cartoon, the form from Flash Vector Cartoon, the composition from Flash Vector Cartoon. Not a real or historical work.

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) Zagreb School of Animated Film

Type from Flash Vector Cartoon
Colour from Zagreb School of Animated Film
Form from Flash Vector Cartoon
Composition from Flash Vector Cartoon
Surface from Zagreb School of Animated Film

Flash Vector Cartoon avoids painterly brushwork and grain & noise: 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

Wow

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 · Zagreb School of Animated Film

The modernist animation of Zagreb Film's Studio for Animated Film, grown from reduced-animation advertisements of 1954-1955 and named the 'Zagreb school' by Georges Sadoul and André Martin after Cannes 1958. Breaking with Disney's full animation, caricaturists and painters, after UPA, Klee and the Suprematists, reduced characters to flat geometric caricatures with wiry limbs and cut the set to empty or textured painted fields, rows of identical figures and a few objects. Limited movement carried satirical, often dark fables of the 'small man' in mass society.

Jost; Zagreb School of Animated Film used Hand-drawn title lettering and Drawn monogram initial

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Zagreb School of Animated Film, 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) Zagreb School of Animated Film

  • #c4c0bb ground · 36%
  • #1c1b1b ink · 14%
  • #cc2a2e accent · 18%
  • #ff3333 accent · 14%
  • #55a9c4 accent · 10%
  • #5a4535 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #c4c0bb;
  --ink: #1c1b1b;
  --accent-1: #cc2a2e;
  --accent-2: #ff3333;
  --accent-3: #55a9c4;
  --accent-4: #5a4535;
  --font-display: "Pixelify Sans", monospace;
  --font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Zagreb School of Animated Film: The films and their characters remain in copyright and are distributed by Zagreb Film, whose logo is a horse: borrow the method (a flat caricature, an empty or textured field, a row of identical men), never a particular character, film or the horse logo, and never present a generated image as a Zagreb Film work. Made in a state-funded studio of socialist Yugoslavia, these films were, as historians read them, neither dissident nor propaganda: do not recast them as either, and do not dress a design in red stars, party slogans or leader portraits as period decor.

04

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. A stylized running child flies a large red kite with a smiling face and a tail of colorful triangular bows. Tall, multicolored lettering reads “HiGHER” above the child, with a small village at the lower right on a textured cream background. 1954–1980 · Southern Europe, Central Europe Zagreb School of Animated Film The modernist animation of Zagreb Film's Studio for Animated Film, grown from reduced-animation advertisements of 1954-1955 and named the 'Zagreb school' by Georges Sadoul and André Martin after Cannes 1958. Breaking with Disney's full animation, caricaturists and painters, after UPA, Klee and the Suprematists, reduced characters to flat geometric caricatures with wiry limbs and cut the set to empty or textured painted fields, rows of identical figures and a few objects. Limited movement carried satirical, often dark fables of the 'small man' in mass society.

05

More combinations

With Flash Vector Cartoon

With Zagreb School of Animated Film

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