Three series of hard/soft styrene-acrylic latex based systems with equivalent compositions were prepared either by blending of homopolymer latexes or by preparing structured latex particles having core shell (CS) or inverted core shell (ICS) morphologies. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to investigate the particle morphologies, which were correlated to the calculated fractional radical penetration for the propagating species during the reactions. The thermo-mechanical properties as well as the morphology of the resulting latex films were analyzed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and TEM. The viscoelastic properties of the interphase between the first and second-stage polymers formed in the structured hard/soft latex films, as well as its qualitative amount and also the film morphologies were found to depend on the interplay between thermodynamic and kinetic parameters during the synthesis of the samples. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.