Style combination · Pairs well

Internet Ugly × Nollywood Video Jacket

Old Nollywood stills already live on as reaction memes; set a cut-out star under meme captions for nostalgic, knowing social posts.

From the research on Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster

Mix them and make something Internet Ugly Nollywood Video Jacket

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Internet Ugly, their arrangement from Nollywood Video Jacket, 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.

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster

Type from Internet Ugly: All caps
Condensed display
Colour from Nollywood Video Jacket: Full polychrome
Complementary clash
Form from Internet Ugly: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Nollywood Video Jacket: Collage & layering
Horror vacui
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

Together

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

Text · Nollywood Video Jacket

The cover and poster art of Nigeria's home-video boom, from Living in Bondage (1992) on. Jackets for cassettes, then VCDs and DVDs, and posters were printed in offset for the marketers of Lagos, Onitsha and Aba. They are made from photographs, not paintings: stars cut out, often roughly, from key scenes and crowded over a busy ground in loud colour under a heavy, outlined title. Gore and melodrama sell by exaggeration; the blurb does the rest. A quieter strand (State of Emergency, Rattlesnake) told the story 'in minimal doses', and festival-bound films now favour minimalist posters.

Archivo; Nollywood Video Jacket used Heavy display titles, in capitals or upper and lower case, filled in yellow, red or orange and outlined or shadowed in a contrasting colour and Plain sans-serif capitals for the cast list, part number, production company and format badges

The colours

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

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster

#0f0b0a ground · 36%
#ece6da ink · 14%
#ff7a1a accent · 18%
#fff200 accent · 14%
#00a2e8 accent · 10%
#c3141b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0f0b0a;
  --ink: #ece6da;
  --accent-1: #ff7a1a;
  --accent-2: #fff200;
  --accent-3: #00a2e8;
  --accent-4: #c3141b;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", 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).

Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster: These jackets show real, named Nigerian actors, so do not reproduce a real actor's likeness or a film's poster in commercial work without rights, and never present a generated image as an original Nollywood poster. Some of the occult-horror films the style sold were made to spread the belief that children can be possessed by evil spirits: End of the Wicked, produced by the preacher Helen Ukpabio, is the best known, and her views have been blamed for the stigmatising and abandonment of children accused of witchcraft. Borrow the montage, colour and type, not the demonising of 'witches', children or traditional religion, and do not use the style as a generic 'chaotic African' backdrop.

The two styles

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.

A crowded supernatural action poster centres on a crying woman wearing red coral beads, surrounded by armed men, distressed women, a red-capped man, and sinister ritual figures. Skulls, candles, a cobra, flames, city buildings, a speedboat, and a woman struggling in water surround the large red-and-yellow title “BROKEN OATH.”

1992–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster The cover and poster art of Nigeria's home-video boom, from Living in Bondage (1992) on. Jackets for cassettes, then VCDs and DVDs, and posters were printed in offset for the marketers of Lagos, Onitsha and Aba. They are made from photographs, not paintings: stars cut out, often roughly, from key scenes and crowded over a busy ground in loud colour under a heavy, outlined title. Gore and melodrama sell by exaggeration; the blurb does the rest. A quieter strand (State of Emergency, Rattlesnake) told the story 'in minimal doses', and festival-bound films now favour minimalist posters.