Snow City Painted

Painted plates are the middle ground and the most forgiving. Colour is already exaggerated, so pushing the palette to a saturated accent does not look like a filter, and the tonal range is deliberately wide, which gives the wordmark a bright band to sit against and a dark corner to shadow into.

They compress better than photoreal for animated formats. Broad areas of related colour are exactly what a 160-colour GIF palette handles well, so a painted scene at 7MB looks closer to its source than a photographic one at the same budget.

Choose painted when the server has no strong tonal identity yet. It is the style least likely to be wrong in a year.

See every painted design.

The only high-key family in the catalogue: the tonal range sits in the upper half instead of the lower, which inverts the usual lettering problem. A dark wordmark works here and a bright one does not, so the defaults use a heavier carbon treatment rather than chrome. Worth knowing before you set a pale accent.

The same scene is also drawn in anime, grunge and photoreal.

Cyan has high luminance, so it reads at tiny sizes and fails white-text contrast checks. Use it as the mark and the ribbon rather than as a fill behind text, and pair it with a pale gold horizon so the lettering has somewhere warm to sit. The combination is the most legible in this catalogue at 96 pixels.

See every cyan design.