Style combination · Pairs well
Risograph × UPA
Riso's flat spot inks and loose registration naturally reproduce the divorced line, which suits small-run picture books, posters and zines today.
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.
Risograph & Indie Print Culture UPA & Cartoon Modern
- Type from Risograph
- Colour from Risograph
- Form from UPA
- Composition from UPA
- Surface from Risograph
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Risograph
Yay!
Inter Tight, standing in for Neo-grotesques set large (e.g. Akzidenz-Grotesk, Helvetica)
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 Risograph, with a counter-accent from UPA. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Risograph & Indie Print Culture UPA & Cartoon Modern
-
#f4f1eaground · 36% -
#3255a4ink · 14% -
#ff48b0accent · 18% -
#d8a32baccent · 14% -
#f15060accent · 10% -
#d6482caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4f1ea;
--ink: #3255a4;
--accent-1: #ff48b0;
--accent-2: #d8a32b;
--accent-3: #f15060;
--accent-4: #d6482c;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
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 Risograph
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Exact Pantone-matched corporate colour is the opposite of riso's drifting inks; use the contrast to signal independence.
- Neo-Swiss Revival Pairs well · Print neo-Swiss grids in two fluorescent riso inks to soften their rigour with grain and overprint.
- Y2K Futurism Contrasts · Glossy chrome renders are everything a riso cannot print; set frictionless screen gloss against tactile grain for deliberate friction.
- WPA Silkscreen Posters Pairs well · WPA silkscreen's flat, separated colour translates directly to riso drums; borrow its layered spot-colour scenes.
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · Print a cordel-style woodcut on a riso in one ink on tinted stock to keep the pocket-chapbook economy for zines and poetry pamphlets.
- Cubist Pictorial Space Pairs well · Print synthetic-Cubist planes as overlapping flat riso inks so the overprints do the faceting for you.
- Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book Pairs well · Today's riso picture books share the few flat inks, bare paper and speckled texture; print a Lebedev-style sequence of floating figures in two or three riso inks.
- Die Neue Typographie Pairs well · Two-colour riso printing suits its black-plus-red restraint for low-budget editorial and posters.
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.
- 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.
- French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) Pairs well · 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.