La Vache Enragée (illustrated journal) - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Iconic figure claim.
Define
A single figure, drawn, silhouetted, or posed, is the whole claim. You can read it across a street.
Mechanism
Compression into a body. The figure is not decoration. It is the sentence. Distance-legibility is the test.
Verdict
Poster scale, outdoor, packaging at a glance
Why it works
One saturated colour does all the eye-directing. The cow is the only filled orange shape on an otherwise line-drawn sheet, so it reads first from across a street and the rest of the scene resolves afterwards. Lautrec builds the gag as radial flight: five figures thrown outward from the animal in five different directions, with the fallen bourgeois cropped huge in the foreground so the eye starts at human scale and is dragged up the diagonal to the cause. The steep cobble perspective tips the road toward the viewer, which places you in the path of the charge instead of outside it watching. Because the picture carries the whole joke wordlessly, the lettering later dropped into the empty upper band only has to say the name.
Steal this when
Steal this when the product or publication name is itself a joke, an idiom or a metaphor, and you can stage the metaphor literally rather than explain it in copy. Steal the one-saturated-colour rule whenever a busy line illustration has to stay legible at twenty metres.