Flat

Solid colours and nothing else: no outlines, no shading, no shine, and eyes that are simple dots. It is the plainest look, and often the boldest.

Six cartoon characters in the Flat look, a person, a kid, a dog, a cat, a bird and a monster, in plain solid colours with no outlines.
The six ready-made characters drawn in the Flat look.

Make a cartoon in this lookEvery look side by side

What it is

Flat draws each shape of a character as one solid colour. Nothing is drawn around the edges, nothing is shaded to look round, and there is no highlight. The eyes are drawn as small dots instead of rings or whites. What is left is pure silhouette and colour, so the character's outline, its pose and its palette carry everything.

When to choose it

Pick Flat when the cartoon is about ideas rather than detail: an explainer, a diagram that comes to life, a quick classroom story where the words matter most. It is also the clearest look on a small screen and in a small video, because there are no thin lines to disappear. And it is a good test of a character: if the shape reads in Flat, it will read in every other look. Because parts of the same colour touch without a line between them, choose colours that are clearly different for parts that overlap, such as an arm in front of a body.

Every character in it

The person and the kid become blocks of shirt, skin and hair colour, with dot eyes that look straight ahead. The dog and the cat show their body shapes most clearly in Flat, since their legs and tails are flat strips of fur colour. The bird is a round body with a pale belly patch, and the monster's spots and belly stand out as plain shapes. Where the page's scripts run, the tiles below show all six, moving.

How it is drawn

Flat turns every drawing effect off: no outline width, no ink colour, no gradient, no hard shadow, no shine, no paper grain and no hatching, and the dot style of eyes. Because the look only changes how the shapes are painted, every move plays exactly the same in Flat as in any other look.