Style combination · Contrasts
Rubber-Hose Revival × UPA
UPA rejected exactly this: it traded rubbery full movement and round bodies for angular caricature, flat modernist sets and limited animation.
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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.
Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics) UPA & Cartoon Modern
- Type from Rubber-Hose Revival
- Colour from UPA
- Form from Rubber-Hose Revival
- Composition from Rubber-Hose Revival
- Surface from UPA
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Rubber-Hose Revival
Wow
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-lettered titles in the manner of early-1930s cartoon title cards: bouncy, swelling capitals drawn to match the character
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
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from UPA, with a counter-accent from Rubber-Hose Revival. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics) UPA & Cartoon Modern
-
#1c1c1cground · 36% -
#f1e8d2ink · 14% -
#d8a32baccent · 18% -
#d7352baccent · 14% -
#2e8c87accent · 10% -
#e893a4accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #1c1c1c;
--ink: #f1e8d2;
--accent-1: #d8a32b;
--accent-2: #d7352b;
--accent-3: #2e8c87;
--accent-4: #e893a4;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics): The early cartoon look this revives is entangled with blackface minstrelsy: several sources trace the black bodies, white gloves and large white eyes of Mickey Mouse and his peers to minstrel caricature, and many 1930s shorts carried explicit racial caricature. Borrow the elastic limbs, round construction and outline, not the minstrel face; never give a character exaggerated lips, dialect or skin colour as an ethnic marker. The characters themselves (Cuphead, Bendy, Mickey, Felix, Oswald, Betty Boop) are still trademarked or copyrighted: invent your own mascot and never ask an image model for a named character or studio hand.
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.
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The two styles
05
More combinations
With Rubber-Hose Revival
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · Both draw stretched figures in flat colour, but the revival gives each brand its own outlined, nostalgic mascot where Corporate Memphis uses interchangeable faceless people.
- Yuru-chara (Japanese Local Mascot Design) Pairs well · Both build a mascot from the thing it promotes; borrow the yuru-chara's costume-ready frontal figure and licensing for a rubber-hose brand character.
- Underground Comix Pairs well · Add its hatching, crowding and adult edge for a darker take on the hose-limbed character, as Bendy turned the cartoon sinister.
- Push Pin Style Contrasts · Push Pin also revived old cartoon and Victorian graphics with playful lettering, but as eclectic editorial illustration; the rubber-hose revival commits to one animation convention and a recurring brand character.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print the mascot's stickers and zines in two riso inks for grain and misregistration that suit its period feel.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · The independent food brand's previous look: a cartoon protagonist replaces the monochrome badge and Victorian craft cues.
- Newtro (Korean New-Retro) Contrasts · Both are post-2017 nostalgic branding in flat spot colour; newtro quotes Korean 1970s–80s packaging and emblems, the revival quotes 1920s–30s American animation.
- CalArts Style (Rounded Cartoon Character Design) Contrasts · Inkier, pie-eyed, nostalgic 1930s mascot drawing against thin-limbed, flat-coloured, contemporary character design.
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.
- 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.