Five flat values and no shading anywhere: black silhouette crowd behind, the lit cream subject in the middle, a large desaturated grey cut-out figure in front. Depth is built purely by value separation and overlap — the nearest figure is the *dullest*, the subject the brightest. Invert the usual instinct to make foreground elements the most saturated.
Steal · typography
'MOULIN ROUGE' is repeated three times on stacked lines with one oversized red 'M' spanning all three as a shared initial. Repetition used as texture rather than emphasis — the name becomes a pattern block. Works for a hero wordmark: set the word three times, let one letter run the full stack height.
Steal · grid/layout
There is no grid. Type sits in four clusters at four different scales, placed wherever the illustration leaves room, and the foreground figure crops through the bottom headline so image and lettering interlock instead of occupying separate bands. Steal for editorial hero art: let one element break the type's bounding box.
Fonts: hand-lettered condensed sans · curated by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891
Every reference here links out to its original, and all referenced work belongs to its creators. What this vault adds — and what it is for — is the human-written commentary: the steal-notes are the content, not the pixels. Study use only.
Made something shown here and want it removed? Email util.wills@gmail.com with the entry title or a link to this page — it comes down promptly, no questions asked.
Try it in your agent · no key
One command puts these notes inside Claude Code. Without a key the agent sees 5 families and gets 5 calls a day — enough to judge the taste before you rent it. The key opens every family and lifts the meter.
claude mcp add --transport http trova https://trova.design/api/mcp
