![]() ![]() Nondescript figures are plastered across train stations and bus stops, from fintech company MoneyFarm, to Trainline, to the Viagra delivery service GetEddie. ![]() Even Transport for London’s own branding, with a special place in the history of Modernist graphic design, has started to replicate the style. ![]() It’s an aesthetic that’s often referred to as ‘ Corporate Memphis’, and it’s become the definitive style for big tech and small startups, relentlessly imitated and increasingly parodied. It involves the use of simple, well-bounded scenes of flat cartoon figures in action, often with a slight distortion in proportions (the most common of which being long, bendy arms) to signal that a company is fun and creative. It’s also drawing intense criticisms from those within the design world.Īnother factor in the proliferation of Corporate Memphis is vast image banks for vector graphics.Ĭorporate Memphis is inoffensive and easy to pull off, and while its roots remain in tech marketing and user interface design, the trend has started to consume the visual world at large. Pablo Stanley is a Mexico City-based illustrator who’s operated several large image databases, where his own flat, wacky SVGs are available open source. He’s been sent pictures of his image bank illustrations skewed and reimagined on billboard advertisements as far away as India and Germany – although he doesn’t keep proper analytics on it, he estimates that his flat cartoons have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by people, and tech companies, around the world. Image banks such as FreePik, UnDraw, and Adobe’s own vector art library, have played a massive part in letting non-illustrators co-opt the Corporate Memphis style for themselves.Ĭorporate Memphis grew, in part, out of a change made by Apple in 2013. Before then, computer interfaces often employed skeuomorphism, an aesthetic that employed shadows and bevelling, along with other visual techniques, to make buttons and icons resemble real world objects. The heavily-ornamental style became less useful to users over time, and, eight years ago, Apple dropped elements of skeuomorphic design in favour of a flattened user interface. “Tech firms adapted their UI systems to embrace the idea of flat design, and illustrations followed,” says Stanley.Īlthough the collection compiled by Evans helped popularise the term Corporate Memphis, it was – she says – actually coined by Mike Merrill, who was working in advertising when he started to experience the deja vu effect of flat, bright designs. Brands like Slack, Salesforce, Robin Hood and WeTransfer all use the style, as well as many of their closest competitors. The name is a play on the 80’s Italian design and architecture group Memphis, which positioned itself as a garish and child-like rejection of functionalist styles. “When you see the CEO of tech companies talk in private or to one another, the way that they frame their view of the world is fascinatingly opposed to the world depicted in a Corporate Memphis illustration,” he continues. “They brag that they live in a world of difficult ideas, of constant fighting between competitors, of cryptographic threats, of constant social change they fight to be in front of and control. They view the world as extremely aggressive and rapidly moving.”Ĭorporate Memphis allows these companies to offer the illusion of a world without hierarchies, where users are afforded the same access and privileges as those who control the platforms. As Rudnick points out, even if the style suggests a playful world that values creativity, the illustrations done in Corporate Memphis style are rarely, if ever, credited to the artist who produced them.īut, despite all this, it may not be worth lamenting the immense reach of Corporate Memphis, or the design possibilities we’ve been deprived of because of it. ![]()
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