LULU IS A RHINOCEROS

Overview

When I was brought onto Lulu Is A Rhinoceros, the typeface and the deep-extruded 3D illustrated style were already established. My job was to take that style and make it feel like it genuinely lived in the same world as the film itself — building out a full title card system, including a distinct color palette for each internal card, all pulled from the actual art direction of the show.

Process

We wanted to hold onto the gradient look from the existing style, so I used the Colorama effect to reassign new color hues based on the existing gradient values — remapping each card to its own palette while keeping the same underlying gradient structure. It took some tuning to land exactly right, but I'm genuinely happy with how the effect turned out across the full set of cards.

I also added a roughened, hand-drawn outline around each letterform — autotracing the shapes to build a stroke outline, then roughening the edge to give it a more organic, less mechanically perfect feel.

The final element came from the client directly: one of the actual Photoshop paint brushes used to color the show. Rather than hand-painting each graphic with it — which would've made revisions painful if more notes came in later — I rendered out a handful of variations of the brush in different sizes, hardness, and opacity into a separate texture file, then brought that into After Effects as an overlay. From there I could manipulate the placement of individual brush strokes with effects, keeping everything looking clean and organic with no obvious repeating pattern across cards.

Final Thoughts

Between the recolored gradients, the hand-drawn outlines, and the client's own brush texture worked into the compositing, the final set of cards feels like it belongs in the same world as the film — distinct from card to card, but clearly part of one system.