Style combination · Contrasts

'Good Morning' Greeting Images × Internet Ugly

The same forwarding networks with the opposite intent: borrow the meme's speed and template logic, and even its jokes, but keep the greeting affectionate rather than ironic.

From the research on 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)

Mix them and make something 'Good Morning' Greeting Images Internet Ugly

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images, their arrangement from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images, 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.

'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular) Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

Type from Internet Ugly: All caps
Condensed display
Colour from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images: Full polychrome
Gradients
Form from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images: Naturalistic depiction
Biomorphic curves
Composition from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images: Full bleed
Single focal point
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

Fiesta

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

Text · 'Good Morning' Greeting Images

The ready-made greeting pictures that millions of smartphone users, many of them older and new to the internet, forward to family, friends and groups each morning on WhatsApp, above all in India and Brazil. A stock photo of flowers, a sunrise, birds, a coffee cup, a baby or, in India, the deity of the day sits under a greeting and a blessing, prayer or proverb. The look runs from glittering, crowded pictures to plain photo-and-text and pastel Canva-style cards, with a joking strand beside the devotional one. Sincere, the picture is mostly sent as it comes; the daily gesture is the message.

Nunito; 'Good Morning' Greeting Images used Script and calligraphic display fonts for the greeting and Devanagari greetings and verses

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images, with a counter-accent from Internet Ugly. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular) Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

#f7a8c4 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#d7263d accent · 18%
#fff200 accent · 14%
#c9a227 accent · 10%
#00a2e8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7a8c4;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #d7263d;
  --accent-2: #fff200;
  --accent-3: #c9a227;
  --accent-4: #00a2e8;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Nunito", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular): Many Indian good-morning images carry deities such as Krishna, Shukra Dev or Shani Dev, and many Brazilian ones carry prayers, Bible verses and saints of the day, so treat them as devotional pictures: do not crop, distort or mock a deity or a prayer, or put one on a joke. The senders are mostly older people, often new to smartphones, for whom the daily greeting keeps up family and friendships, so design with them rather than to sneer at 'tiozão do zap' taste. The photographs are usually stock or lifted from other sites and carry template makers' watermarks, so license or shoot your own pictures, and have every Hindi, Portuguese or other line checked by a fluent reader.

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

2013–present · South Asia, Latin America & Caribbean 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular) The ready-made greeting pictures that millions of smartphone users, many of them older and new to the internet, forward to family, friends and groups each morning on WhatsApp, above all in India and Brazil. A stock photo of flowers, a sunrise, birds, a coffee cup, a baby or, in India, the deity of the day sits under a greeting and a blessing, prayer or proverb. The look runs from glittering, crowded pictures to plain photo-and-text and pastel Canva-style cards, with a joking strand beside the devotional one. Sincere, the picture is mostly sent as it comes; the daily gesture is the message. 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.