Style combination · Pairs well
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster × UPA
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.
Mix them and make something French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster 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.
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) UPA & Cartoon Modern
- Type from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- Colour from UPA
- Form from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- Composition from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- Surface from UPA
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
Wow
Londrina Solid; French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster used Brand name painted by the artist into the picture, often in bold sans capitals on the product itself and Roman capitals over a lowercase italic line, lettered on the product
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 French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) UPA & Cartoon Modern
-
#1c1c1cground · 36% -
#f1e8d2ink · 14% -
#d8a32baccent · 18% -
#d8291faccent · 14% -
#2e8c87accent · 10% -
#e893a4accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #1c1c1c;
--ink: #f1e8d2;
--accent-1: #d8a32b;
--accent-2: #d8291f;
--accent-3: #2e8c87;
--accent-4: #e893a4;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan): Savignac, Villemot, Morvan and Carlu are in copyright (Adagp, Paris), and some of their images are still brand property: Savignac's Bic boy is part of the BIC logo, and Orangina reissued Villemot's zest parasol on its bottles in 2011. Invent your own gag for your own product rather than redrawing the Monsavon cow, the Maggi ox or the Bic boy, do not prompt an image model for a named affichiste's hand, and never present a generated image as a vintage affiche.
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 French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · The grid, neutral sans and photography of the same decades are its opposite in tone; one hand-drawn gag dropped into a Swiss layout makes a deliberate, disarming tension.
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat) Contrasts · Its Swiss contemporary paints the product as a modelled, larger-than-life icon; choose between wit by cartoon drawing and wit by illusion, or set one against the other.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Contrasts · The same Paris walls twenty years apart: the gag poster sells a product with one good-natured colour-lithograph joke, while the 1968 students' one-colour screenprints turn the same single image and hand-lettered slogan to agitation.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Borrow Push Pin's invented display lettering and period quotation to give a gag poster an editorial voice, but keep the single joke and the empty ground.
- Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Pairs well · Savignac's and Villemot's one-figure, one-prop sight gags on a flat ground are the model for a strong premise image; borrow the single visual pun to sharpen a cover that has drifted into two figures simply standing side by side.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Both put one cartoon figure on a plain ground with the name drawn into the picture; the gag poster is a professional's single punchline at hoarding scale, the wine label an amateur's picture at bottle scale. Borrow Savignac's one-image-one-idea discipline to keep a naive label from turning into a scrapbook.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Contrasts · Savignac's visual gag is drawn and painted to make people smile at a product; the Kassel poster finds its pun in photographs and silhouettes, and its humour is darker and aimed at a film's or play's subject.
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.