Style combination · Pairs well

Internet Ugly × Ukrainian Wartime Graphics

NAFO's Fellas come from the Doge meme and the image-macro habit of pasting a character into a photo; pair a rough meme edit with a clean flat vector figure for a quick reply to the day's news.

From the research on Ukrainian Wartime Graphics (Saint Javelin, War Stamps and Be Brave Like Ukraine)

Mix them and make something Internet Ugly Ukrainian Wartime Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Ukrainian Wartime Graphics, their arrangement from Ukrainian Wartime Graphics, 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 Ukrainian Wartime Graphics (Saint Javelin, War Stamps and Be Brave Like Ukraine)

Type from Internet Ugly: All caps
Condensed display
Colour from Ukrainian Wartime Graphics: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Ukrainian Wartime Graphics: Stylised figuration
Emblems & badges
Composition from Ukrainian Wartime Graphics: Single focal point
Isolated object
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

Wow

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

Text · Ukrainian Wartime Graphics

The graphics of Ukraine's defence since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, made by the state, the national post, agencies, illustrators and volunteers at home and abroad. Flat figures in the flag's blue and yellow are drawn to read at sticker and stamp size; sacred and official forms are recast with dark humour, from an icon Madonna cradling a Javelin missile to a soldier giving the finger to the cruiser Moskva on a postage stamp. Memes, merchandise and photographs under the trident turn morale into fundraising and a national brand of bravery.

Space Grotesk; Ukrainian Wartime Graphics used KTF Jermilov (Kyiv Type Foundry, 2021), a modular display face whose capitals are built from a few geometric elements on a 3 × 5 square grid, after the typographic practice of the Kharkiv avant-garde designer Vasyl Yermylov; used in Be Brave Like Ukraine and Yermylov Bold, made in 2018 for Banda's Ukraine NOW country brand and inspired by Yermylov's constructivist work

The colours

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

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Ukrainian Wartime Graphics (Saint Javelin, War Stamps and Be Brave Like Ukraine)

#f4f1e8 ground · 36%
#1c1c1c ink · 14%
#0057b7 accent · 18%
#00a2e8 accent · 14%
#c9a14a accent · 10%
#ff7f27 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1e8;
  --ink: #1c1c1c;
  --accent-1: #0057b7;
  --accent-2: #00a2e8;
  --accent-3: #c9a14a;
  --accent-4: #ff7f27;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Grotesk", 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).

Ukrainian Wartime Graphics (Saint Javelin, War Stamps and Be Brave Like Ukraine): This is the visual culture of a country under invasion, and most of it refers to real events and real people, among them the Snake Island border guards, the Moskva and the tractors that towed away abandoned Russian tanks, so use it to support Ukraine and its fundraisers, not as an edgy 'war' look for unrelated products. Saint Javelin is a charity brand run by Christian Borys, built on Chris Shaw's painting with his after-the-fact acceptance; lawyers for the soldier who spoke the warship line and for the Ukrainian military filed for an EU trademark on it in March 2022 against clothing firms that tried to register it; the stamps belong to Ukrposhta and the campaign to the state and Banda, so do not sell copies or close pastiches. The icon parodies put a weapon where the Christ child should be, and Borys defends them by the tradition of icons that comforted soldiers, but they can hurt believers, and even the murals have been contested (a trident halo on a Kyiv Saint Javelin mural was painted over), so do not put weapons into the sacred images of other faiths. Scholars such as Nadia Kaneva describe the Be Brave campaign as nation branding used as propaganda, so label state material as state material, and never present a generated image as a Ukrainian stamp, campaign poster or work of a Ukrainian artist.

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 blue-and-yellow illustration shows a woman wearing a sunflower wreath with flowing ribbons and an embroidered blouse, holding a bundle of wheat. Large yellow capitals beneath her read “OUR HARVEST.”

2022–present · Eastern Europe, Global / networked Ukrainian Wartime Graphics (Saint Javelin, War Stamps and Be Brave Like Ukraine) The graphics of Ukraine's defence since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, made by the state, the national post, agencies, illustrators and volunteers at home and abroad. Flat figures in the flag's blue and yellow are drawn to read at sticker and stamp size; sacred and official forms are recast with dark humour, from an icon Madonna cradling a Javelin missile to a soldier giving the finger to the cruiser Moskva on a postage stamp. Memes, merchandise and photographs under the trident turn morale into fundraising and a national brand of bravery.