Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis | Hacker News Reader

Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis

wired.co.uk

203 pointsdehrmann189 comments

I hate Corporate Memphis as much as the next person but

> “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years.

seems like it’s reading a bit too much.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who detected the scent of what I call "arthouse wankery" here. This is popular for the same reason flat UIs are popular - they're easy to create, blandly inoffensive, and convey "modern" to the viewer.

Seriously. It has a lot more to do with the idea too that if you look similar to other big companies who are using it then you'll get a modicum of a trust factor out of the gate than some nefarious psy op.

In an exactly same way,as all the energy companies went on to use green colour on thier websites,while anything enterprise software related was always blue/skye blue. Nothing really new on this front.

Same reason everybody went with Bootstrap, Stripe included.

It can be, and generally is, both (if by "arthouse wankery" you mean design theory).

I wouldn't tar all of design theory with the brush of being Kabbalistic medieval-metaphysics-like random intuitive associations. Only some of it is like that.

Hey now, medieval metaphysics got us Occam's razor...

And nuclear physics got us the nuclear disarmament program.

Not quite sure what you're trying to say: that applies in similar ways to basically every academic speciality. And what the parent quoted: it's just an observation based on theory, similar historical trends, and his own practice. It might be _wrong_, but it's not metaphysics or random association. It's not even really an academic point at all, it's a technical point: specific art styles are commonly used to communicate certain messages to the viewer. The utilitatarian reasons for "why this style" are all correct, but they provide only half an explanation

Honestly this is the point the article makes in all but 2 or 3 paragraphs.

Well, it feels modern now.

In 2030, it will feel clunky and old, to the sort of people who pay attention to these things.

2030 designers:

Ugh, you're still using squircles? Your icons should have translucent gradient blurred backgrounds!

Everyone knows large x-height sans serif fonts are untrustworthy lawyer text. Small x-height grotesks convey likeability.

reminds me of the now-infamous Pepsi "Breathtaking" design document https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

I’ve never heard of this before. It’s an elaborate parody... right?

It is absolutely real [1][2], and was quite the scandal at the time. If the reporting is to be believed, PepsiCo paid about $1 million for the branding strategy. All to arrive at a blob that looks like a fat person with a red shirt and blue pants separating from each other at the waistline [3]. So yes, it is a bit unreal.

[1] https://adage.com/article/agency-news/breathtaking-word-purp...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/1160304/pepsi-logo-design-brief-...

[3] https://www.cannotunsee.net/post/730928004/pepsi

> All to arrive at a blob that looks like a fat person with a red shirt and blue pants separating from each other at the waistline

So what you're saying is that their new logo was really just their old mascot [1] who had let themselves go?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=pepsi%20man&tbs=img...

I still remember the first time someone pointed it out to me all those years ago... I'll skip the steps of charting out hundreds of circles for millions of dollars and just say that I interpret it as a hyperreality.

I love this, true modern art. My favorite bit is on page 26, illustrating the "gravitational pull of Pepsi".

Is it just me, or do all the pepsi logos look like second place? I can't see them from a blank slate, but the smooth curves and contrasting colors scream #2 to me.

Oh, I remember this. I wonder how much of it was they came up with the design quickly and realized they had a lot of time and money left, so they got to work on the justification process that we see here.

This document is insane. It feels like everyone involved in the production of it is so utterly disconnected from reality.

That first page “Trajectory of innovation” with the pseudograph is an utterly hilarious distillation of the madness yet to come. The deeper I read into the document the worse it got.

Golden ratio, Patterns being found where there were none to begin with (“perimeter oscillations”), Pepsi Energy fields, Pepsi Universe.

This reads like a pamphlet buckling under the excited and emphatic pointing of a disheveled man with a tinfoil hat on saying “SEE, SEE THE TRUTH IS ALL IN HERE!”

What learning can be taken from this? Is it a case of the train of thought being very poorly explained? Or is it a case of self absorbed people surrounded by “yes-men” basking in the glory of their own brilliance?

> What learning can be taken from this?

That being stupidly outrageous is a great marketing strategy considering we're still all discussing a branding document from 2009. The gravitational pull of Pepsi is real! :)

Holy shit, I think you're right.

I doubt the C-suit bought into the gravity argument. However there is a smile like quality to the new design, as is pointed out in the design docs, and this is probably what resonated with the executives during the pitch.

I also wonder about whether this document is actually the real one as presented to the company. For example am I the only one that sees the hint of a 'P' shape in the new whitespace between the red and blue colored elements? Wouldn't this have been a more convincing feature of the design to highlight than the pages about DNA, gravity and special relativity?

> What learning can be taken from this?

If a giant corporation offers up millions of dollars to have a design agency blow smoke up their ass, they will find an agency willing to generate as much smoke as needed to separate them from their cash.

The pepsi universe and magnetic fields parts are utter bs but there's some stuff in there that I feel matters, the shelf angles and golden ratio basis.

Rebranding and changing such an iconic logo would go all the way to the top, quite doubt such BS would fly with execs. I'm not a designer and I don't work at pepsi so who knows though.

This seems to have been created by a design company Arnell group for Pepsi. I wonder how much Pepsi paid them

Do we have any data to show a correlation between golden ratio basis in branding and higher sales?

>What learning can be taken from this? Is it a case of the train of thought being very poorly explained?

My first question would be if the rebranding was a success? I generally think people are too dismissive of seemingly insane approaches to work. If this guy or girl needed to channel ancient Indian traditions, golden ratios and numerology to get inspired and make the best pepsi logo they could make, who are we to judge

In particular for creative work, there's certainly a lot of good stuff that's born out of sheer insanity, maybe bullshitting too.

In my own art form (theater), there's a fair bit of effort spent being deliberately stupid in order to get us out of our existing patterns. A lot of famously idiotic acting exercises aren't really about the work you're doing, but about breaking your habits and being un-self-conscious about it.

The whole theory is that you can't think your way into a natural performance, unless what you want is exactly the same as the actor's own habits. There are things that make you instantly recognizeable even at a distance: how you walk, how much of a gap you place at the end of a sentence, how high you pitch your voice. A 3D model has the kind of control they need to walk in character, stand in character, raise their eyebrows in character, etc., but you don't. You have to first break your existing habits, then start from blank.

It's not the only way to act; you can get great performances without that. But it's a valid tool that works for some people.

I don't particularly like that new Pepsi logo, but it's still in use. They use it all over the place. So it sounds like it was moderately successful. It didn't become truly iconic (the way the Coca-Cola or Disney logos are), but that kind of success is rare.

I feel you, 100%, but still, might it not be true in a subliminal sense? It is easy to dismiss, and hard to prove, but at the same time this is exactly the plane of communication on which advertising and (other forms of) propaganda operate in large part. I feel pretty sure saying that at least not all of it is complete nonsense.

No, this is a very well-troden component of visual design. Depth is used to portray passage time. You even see it in Byzantine religious iconography.

I'm an Orthodox Christian and was starting to write a really long post bordering on an essay about it. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for bringing it up.

I am not an iconographer, but I know that we hold onto a perspective with multiple vanishing points, creating intersecting diagonal perspective lines that closely resemble an isometric view precisely to create a timeless, comprehensive view of a liturgically significant event.

Marshall McLuhan said something along the lines of the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance ushering in a world that had at last a single point of view. I’ll give Rudnick some rope.

Had a discussion about this style with an illustrator friend a few months ago.

Illustration is genuinely better at conveying concepts than photography, and everyone is tired of lightbulbs, puzzle pieces, people in suits shaking hands and other stock photo cliches.

Problem is, commissioning an illustrator, especially a good one, is expensive and time consuming and takes excellent art direction to get right.[1]

This style however, is cheap, easy (anyone with a bit of drawing ability can do it), it’s sort of cozy and friendly, and doesn’t have any real negative cultural associations. It also wasn’t, until about six months ago, so totally overexposed it’s become a cliche in itself.

Now, there’s no excuse to use it - just betrays a fatal lack of originality. Might as well include an image of someone reaching up to a blue wireframe globe superimposed with zeroes and ones and @ symbols.

[1] Original illustration isn’t used nearly as much as it could or should be in digital products. Nautil.us do it well, but they are a magazine. Seriously, commission more illustration, it’s great.

> Might as well include an image of someone reaching up to a blue wireframe globe superimposed with zeroes and ones and @ symbols.

I'd prefer that.

> This style however, is cheap, easy (anyone with a bit of drawing ability can do it)

Hey, speak for yourself. That's more drawing ability than *I* have. :p

A lot of the reason for these design trends is that no one has the courage to think differently, so you get huge numbers of companies all looking virtually identical.

It's a bit like 'nobody gets fired for buying IBM/McKinsey' etc...no one challenges product managers and marketing when yet another adobe illustrator generated Memphis style brand identity & UI is unveiled, complete with multi cultural inclusive visual banality. At some point this will suddenly be deader than an animated gif of a flame and the next trend will quickly become ubiquitous.

I wonder perhaps too if the more prestigious resumes start coming from companies that embrace these trends, further reinforcing them across industry.

I think it's more ultitarian than that. Companies have traditionally got what they need by using these conventions.

Hopefully that will change, because it sure is boring.

When I’m trying to do computer tasks, I want to get them done, not decipher some design wonks metaphor and hyperbole.

You want thinking different? Try trotting out a line that doesn’t start out like an old man pissed at them kids for not being as competent as folks were “back in his day.”

The whole point of modern logistics is to simplify them so we can maximize time for ourselves instead of flogging the profit chant of last generations rubes seeking Valhalla.

>with multi cultural inclusive visual banality

Lumping in cultural inclusivity with your critique is quite revealing. There's nothing in the article or about this style of illustration that hints at cultural values, why include it in the tirade?

Anti-racism is on trend this year.

I think it'll stay for next year too, considering how many years anti-racism has been on trend.

Racialization - making everything about racial characteristics and pitting races against each other - is what has been 'on trend' recently and the world is a poorer place for it. Anti racism has been around forever and always should be, because drawing attention to and excluding people due to their race is completely unacceptable in liberal democracy merit based societies.

I don't see how putting people with darker skin in art could possibly be seen as "pitting races against each other". Would the artstyle be improved if it only depicted white people?

No.

The pictures in the article include skin tones such as purple and fuschia.

To me this visual style screams:

“Of COURSE we’re totally ok with…those people we cannot correctly enumerate, even superficially. That doesn’t mean we’d include anything too controversial like those <insert racial epithet here>‘s.”

To each their own, I guess. At least they’re trying?

That’s actually not what racialization means. Racialization is the creation of race as a social construct. “Racial characteristics” aren’t fixed; the Nazis considered Jewish people a “race” despite what they looked like.

Race isn’t a real thing. It’s something we made up because it was a justification for why it was ok to oppress people with the characteristics we dislike (we tried enslaving people with lighter skin; turns out they were able to escape and blend in with the population).

@wayoutthere In sociology racialization/ethnicization is ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such.

You will find lots of groups of people who aren't happy about being categorized then defended or attacked by people who are 'speaking for them'.

The obvious current example is the overwhelmingly white US #BLM movement. If you go to a California black neighborhood and talk to people they are v suspicious of BLM's motives. Another new one is the latest acronym #AANHPI (Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander).

I don't enjoy being categorized, pigeon holed and criticized like any other sane person but we appear to be in the midst of a mania for people speaking on behalf of others to push their own agendas.

I heard Tulsi Gabbard (an'#AANHPI POC') use the term racialization of everything recently and think she is sensible and spot on with her one love messaging and pointing out the endless divisions currently being created in societies.

Regarding slavery, I'm sure you're aware there are more slaves in Africa now than there were in the brief era when european and US maritime merchants bought slaves off slavers along with other 'products'? The current specious rewriting of history to imply slavery was invented by colonial white people is so far off base it is a huge danger to society and ignores today's realities. It is also a powerful tool for feeding racialization paranoias.

> If you go to a California black neighborhood and talk to people they are v suspicious of BLM's motives.

Have you done this? I live in a majority black neighborhood but not in California and I talk to my neighbors. I have heard a lot of skepticism and hostility towards _the organization calling itself by that name_. But not towards the movement itself or the phrase it uses to represent itself.

It’s a talking point from the right I’ve been hearing recently, along with “there were more slaves in Africa than the US”. It’s just more whataboutisms to distract from the utter lack of coherent policy from that side of the US political spectrum.

Do you seriously think there were more slaves in the USA than in Africa?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

The person you're replying to did not at any point say that.

What he said was that deflecting criticism of slavery in North America by mentioning slavery in Africa is an attempt to mislead by distraction, i.e., whataboutism. Yes, there were horrible things done elsewhere; but that does lessen the horrible things done in the USA in any way.

I have done this, yes. Your point is well taken: no question there is support for less racism towards black people (including racism amongst black peoples) but there is often deep suspicion about political motives of movements, from the black power 70's to the current Marxist BLM leadership.

Many POC are right wing of course, an inconvenient truth for people who like to think we live in a world of blue (good) versus Red (bad).

I see representation as a positive thing, but it's definitely part of the style.

I was an art director and a creative director last century - mine was not a tirade, more observation of cowardly corporate clients.

Regarding 'multi cultural inclusive visual banality' this is a cultural low tide that is dropping all boats IMO: portraying everyone as mediocre little personas with cute skin colors and different simplified costumes like a cast of playmobile people.

...no one has the courage to think differently...

Almost no ordinary company wants to present themselves as wholly bizarre and strange. Many companies want to present themselves as basically normal but with a few interesting quirks and affections. Getting that balance right is hard, so you get the system that the article describes; it lets a variety of organizations appear slightly different in more or less the same way.

People manage "coolness" effectively for upward mobility integrate the unusual into something that's mostly mainstream - have a leather jacket or a quirky haircut or whatever. I'll spend time at industrial music festivals where no one expects to get but that's a decision and not the sort that anyone should expect a business to make.

(also, you'd do well to avoid the multiculturalism issue)

Someone sent this around a few weeks ago - it's a lot more harsh/critical:

https://www.marketplace.org/2021/04/15/a-primer-on-corporate...

> Merrill: I think Facebook is probably the biggest example of it. They went through a phase where they were using this style universally. And, you know, they are one of the darkest companies as far as how they’re using that customer data. And it is all about this idea of, “Trust me. I’m a trustworthy company.” And let’s not look behind the curtain and see what’s actually going on. So I think it’s a really nefarious way to hide behind visual language.

My immediate thought was of rhetorical training in the ancient world. On the one hand, training in rhetoric will help you persuade, and on the other, will also help you become aware when someone else is using those techniques.

One of the five parts of rhetoric was called "ethos", which is concerned with how to establish yourself with your audience as trustworthy and sympathetic. In advertising, lots of elements beyond mere words are employed to establish ethos, visual style, sound, editing.

But I suppose I never explicitly considered the visual display of an application as an exercise in rhetoric, though upon reflection, it certainly can be. Perhaps we all need visual-rhetorical training.

The name refers to how it resembles the work of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group

Thanks for answering the most obvious question anyone would have about this phenomenon that was inexplicably totally missing from the article itself.

It isn’t; they mention it.

Though, fairly buried after using the term constantly throughout the beginning of the piece!

Didn't find it myself so I came back to HN and saw GP comment. Then cmd+f for "italian" to find it in the article.

> 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.

From the article.

For visual reference, Evan Collin's Are.na block is the most cohesive collection of this aesthetic I've found online https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/memphis-general-g....

The Memphis-esque style is definitely having a moment. You'll notice that the Chillwave aesthetic borrowed a ton of visual cues as well.

I find the "childlike" quality of it oddly appropriate for modern corps, but not in a good way, more like "we know we're infantilising you. Drink up!"

I'm surprised this article is referring to it as "Corporate Memphis", when Memphis was already commercialized heavily in the 1980s. Every mall in America looked like that.

What we have today I would think would be more like neo-Memphis. Similar, maybe less pastel and less gradients and less soft filtered.

That aesthetic screams 1986 to me. Not sure why I pick that year as it could apply to any number of years around that period; Nikelodeon shows well into the 90s used that aesthetic for sure.

Tim Burton's movies often have aesthetic mini-manifestos embedded in them. For example, Beetlejuice represented the reverse of the classic "ghost story", one in which the ghosts were sweet, earnest, and identifiable while the living people were horrid and monstrous. So for the Maitlands, Burton chose the aesthetic of their traditional Victorian Connecticut home with all its understated ornateness. The building has "character", which the young couple wish to preserve.

The Deetzes (except for Lydia) are represented by... Memphis. And the fact that they strip the home down and completely remodel it into a Memphis mishmash indicates how horrible and destructive they are.

That said, OG Memphis at least has an element of fun and funkiness to it. Think the opening titles of Saved by the Bell. Corporate Memphis is about as funky as the KPMG theme song: https://youtu.be/NCvKXgp-Awo

I never heard about the KPMG theme song before. Now it feels like a parody of "Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI

I first thought of hieroglyphs from Memphis Egypt, which also lack any depth and are drawn similarly.

https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_925/http...

I think its interesting that the flat look was pioneered by Microsoft going back to the days of the Zune2 and later lumia phones that had the first Metro interface. Then google and Apple and everyone else started following. People don't think of Microsoft (and especially Zune...) as a leader in design, but I think they have had a big impact on the industry, and deserves some recognition.

It's certainly Metro-influenced, but one wishes the real deal Metro came back.

I think you can probably trace some influence even further back to webTV. Check out its flat "10-foot UI" from 1999: https://youtu.be/eHJN9cMo4P4?t=156

Microsoft's UltimateTV set-top-box hardware group got folded into the Xbox division in 2002: https://www.mrt.com/news/article/Microsoft-to-Eliminate-TV-D...

And then in 2006 (per Wikipedia), "Xbox 360 overseer J Allard ran the [Toshiba Gigabeat 1089] project, codenamed 'Argo', staffed with Xbox and MSN Music Store developers who worked on 'Alexandria', finalized as Zune Marketplace."

> Check out its flat "10-foot UI" from 1999

That doesn't look flat whatsoever. There are plenty of three-dimensional layout elements in that UI.

Are you currently ten feet away from a fuzzy 24” consumer CRT television?

Not at the moment, but the design elements are similar enough to the ones I'd see on my satellite receiver OSD menus from back in the early 2000s. I could tell that those were 3D as well at the time, and my TV at the time was a fuzzy 36" CRT from the 1990s.

And I'm glad for it! 3D design elements make a lot of sense on those kinds of displays, because they work well to stand out despite the relatively low resolution and color contrast.

After Windows 95 came out, fucking everyone used Franklin Black in their advertisements. I saw it everywhere -- online, on billboards, in television advertisements. Microsoft may have the aesthetic tastes of a lame, "greetings fellow young people" dad, but they were the biggest name in the tech field... and that meant people copied their design language in the hopes of seeming equally big and important.

TFA wrongly credits Apple with the flat trend.

You don't get credit for being the first, you get credit for being significant. Zune and Windows Phone didn't get "people" into flatter aesthetics, Apple did.

I would argue that Android got there before iOS did.

I came here to make this exact point.

The skeuomorphic to flat transition that the Windows Phone did was beautiful and groundbreakingly different. I loved it. Shame about the rest of that OS.

Metro was minimalist in a highway sign sense - less color, lots of emphasis on text and distinct shapes/outlines. I don't think flat designs we have now are all that similar.

The irony is that there's nothing Memphis here. It's all corporate.

Original 80s Memphis was migraine-inducingly Weird As Fuck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group

A very heavily watered down version influenced MTV and an even more neutered version was splattered across numerous corporate brochures and reports in the 90s. But it was only Memphis in the most superficial sense, riffing off bright colours, geometric squiggles, and a few stock Memphis textures like zebra print.

This doesn't even have that. It's just bland, cartoony, sometimes literally faceless, and flat - visually as well as emotionally.

I can see some similarities. There are lots of geometric shapes as well as bright pastel colors used in this new "corporate Memphis".

Losing all identity is the final fate of anything that becomes corporate.

From a technical perspective I enjoy using graphics that are able to be rendered as a SVG. I believe that is why this style has taken off, it is able to be served and rendered with regard to performance. The article presents it as a change made by Apple, but it was really the frontend that pushed visuals like this.

I support redesigns every three years and have stopped recommending the faceless images that is Memphis Group. Trends are great, regular work to purge trends is even better.

> I believe that is why this style has taken off, it is able to be served and rendered with regard to performance.

Bingo. This and the flexibility to compose your own scenery from those illustration systems vs. hunting down the right stock image or hiring a photographer.

> 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

I see a CEO who won’t squirrel away over details that are irrelevant to making money, isn't married to a company as their baby, and has in particular let go of the design process and given it to designers or design firms because that CEO doesn't actually care. And that’s perfect.

I think of companies as short expeditions to the New World to get the gold, return, and everybody disbands and never talks to each other again. Imagine if Columbus instead told the Queen of Spain that he wanted frills on the sails of the Nina, and that the typography needed changing. Would be absurd. Same for companies.

This view of reality has been a highly effective for me.

Products made by people who take no pride in the product are rarely good. It's the difference between enterprise slime and the software that you actually use on your personal computer. Most software really doesn't exist in a competitive market, it's naturally monopolistic, so you can't just rely on market forces to ensure it isn't shit.

And the counterpoint is that Instagram is great. A dozen people got the $1bn buyout, a few years of Facebook vesting and moved on.

The general distribution of all products suck. Has nothing to do with the speculators that consider their $0 par value shares to be part of their portfolio.

It's the world we live in.

But to say the situation is perfect, is quite simply a lie.

I know plenty of people that squirrel away over irrelevant details for new businesses and can’t distinguish between relevant and irrelevant

I specifically didn’t say perfect I said ‘effective’, and ‘for me’: The executive, board member, and advisor for various ventures.

You're missing my point.

The fact these CEOs are only concerned with profit, and the fact you drew a comparison between these ventures and colonialism .. is a very apt summary.

You used the word 'perfect'.

It's perfect in terms of achieving these aims, and as I mentioned in another comment .. the style is definitely indicative of the system it serves.

However, a lot of the factors involved are very suboptimal in my mind.

You're right I see now I did use the word perfect. I was thinking about my conclusion, but yes. I can't work with a perfectionist and also controlling CEO. I can't buy shares from one either. I don't want to waste meeting time with one.

Typical initial hurdles and their solution:

The name of the company on the incorporation documents doesn't matter.

You don't need a lawyer to incorporate.

Just get the logo done on Fiverr.

You don't need a team page on your website. Nobody cares.

Your co-founders are not 50% or equal shareholders.

Keep most of the shares.

Do non-dilutive things.

Stop adding non-standard things to sweeten the deal to potential investors. They either want shares or they don't.

“It really boils my piss to be honest,” says Jack Hurley, a Leeds-based illustrator who says his main output is “daft seaside posters.”

If you are a Brit (or even otherwise) I really recommend taking a look at Hurley's work [0]. The taglines for each resort are just superb - e.g. "Cleethorpes - The Final Resort"

As an aside, I'm reminded of the old joke that Cleethorpes doesn't have a twin town, but is in a suicide pact with Grimsby.

[0] https://www.pinterest.co.uk/christinefbosha/jack-hurley-post...

He wrote an article for The Guardian a couple of years ago in which he explains his work - cracking images in it, too:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/nov/29/rubbish-seasi...

This is from January, there's other articles around mentioning this trend

Here's another angle: It's Killing Brands https://www.aleksandrhovhannisyan.com/blog/blue-people-illus...

I think that the aim of this style is a type of corporate PR, to give off a safe, unoffensive feeling.

I then think that this feeling is intended to preempt the user's knowledge that the company is doing unethical things. Either environmentally, or with the user's private data, or otherwise.

A good example is Google, (see some corporate memphis here, https://blog.google/technology/health/when-it-comes-mental-h...), who needs to project this image in order for you to feel safe while sharing your most private details with the company.

The point of these design languages is to affect a sense of power. One of the funniest versions of this was 1990's tech aesthetic that was pure (Italian) Futurism, without any sense of irony about its origins.

Corporate Memphis looks like a variation of it. There is a word I can't seem to find, and it's for when you take a font or an image and round it to make it seem softer, safer, and less assertive, and so-called "feminine." The Corporate Memphis designers have essentially taken the aesthetics of both futurism and "Naive Art," to create this new language of patronizing global banality. It's not about adding or emphasizing diverse elements, it's about homogenizing them, which captures the whole purpose I think.

I saw a piece in a SF-based Italian art museum that was four panels, each with about 20 small cubbies. In each cubby was an individual abstract, brightly painted wood shape (carving?). If you squinted even a bit, it was indistinguishable from a list of modern corporate logos. Not the same as futurism, but I could see the artistic lineage.

Becomes especially funny when you consider the ideological origins of Italian Futurism. Hint: What was the dominant ideology in Italy in the 1930s and 40s.

It's even more problematic. The relationship is more accurately understood in the opposite direction: fascism in some ways grew out of futurism (a lot of important exponents of futurism loved action and violence and speed enough to volunteer and get themselves killed in airplanes etc. in the first world war).

> There is a word I can't seem to find, and it's for when you take a font or an image and round it to make it seem softer, safer, and less assertive, and so-called "feminine."

I don't know the word either, but this reminds me of the concept of "elevator music"

It’s largely driven by corporations trying to be as broad and inoffensive as possible.

Not sure what skin color to use? Make them blue. Are your depictions of humans too thin, or too ableist? Make them misshapen blobs so nobody can tell. Not sure how to include non-binary representation? Just make them all genderless.

This is so bland and dystopian. Mutated blob people make me hate interacting with corporate products.

If you're going to do this, at least use creativity. Discord does a fantastic job of being inclusive and yet creative.

Corporate culture has deemed it a better tradeoff to be called uncreative than to be called k-ist or j-phobic. Most of these people just want to do their jobs and go home at the end of the day, not thread the political needle at great expense if it goes wrong.

I just think of it as "Doug, but everyone has elephantiasis" https://i.imgur.com/LMqi9fp.png

It's so inoffensive that it has become offensive to me, with an "evil megacorp" association.

There used to be true artistry and celebration of beauty in corporate advertising. Look at the works of Toulouse-Lautrec or Alphonse Mucha. But no college kid is going to be putting up posters of these misshapen flat people in their college dorm.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fe/a1/24/fea1247eb6d9d47c6997...

I... guess "celebration of beauty" is a good description, but let's be honest: it's insulting and artistically lazy.

Definitely not politically correct these days, but unlike Corporate Memphis it's memorable, a trait important for adverts.

The difference between the crude poster you linked to and the women portrayed by Mucha is enormous. I would say the poster you cited does not celebrate beauty at all. This one, for Trappist Liquor, does: https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Trappistine-Liquors-Posters_i...

> The difference between the crude poster you linked to and the women portrayed by Mucha is enormous.

I wasn't trying to character assassinate your favourite commercial artists. I was trying to claim that they aren't representative of the past.

In the gay community you’ll still see these kind of ads in 2021. And I don’t think anyone particularly cares...

Yes, it’s a cheap trick and tacky. But it’s also a recognition that sexual desire and beauty are real things and a part of our shared human experience.

An element not mentioned much in this thread is the significant challenges in using actual photography/people: expensive and time-consuming for custom work, super choppy legal waters (can't tell you how many times the subject of a photo pulled from Unsplash reached out asking how we got their pic), and paltry options for online buying ("free" sites like aforementioned Unsplash or expensive Getty and their craptastic library).

I don't think this has much to do with technology or Photoshop - these memes are always he case where a few leading agencies in NYC do something for some big clients and then everyone copies. It's 'creative herd mentality as driven by generally non-marketing CEO's making the final decision on creative'.

A good example of this is Volkswagen's "Think Small" advertisement from the 1960s [1]. Plenty of magazine ads ripped off this style afterwards.

[1] https://pages.uncc.edu/visualrhetoric/projects/individual-pr...

Interestingly, this has spread to second-tier virtual worlds. Decentraland, Sominium Space, and Facebook Horizon all have that look. It's the opposite of the realistic, gritty world of AAA game titles.

It's safe and banal. Facebook is very concerned about "safety".[1] By which they mean "no sex", not "no scams". Their solution to this in Horizon is that their characters have no body below the waist.

[1] https://youtu.be/Uf_9J_EdzZw

Here's a good selection of Corporate Memphis, for your reference.

https://www.are.na/claire-l-evans/corporate-memphis

The 80s Memphis style was like Bauhaus but with more formica, but this new style is more of an attempt to make rapacious startups funded by vulture capital/rapacious megacorps intent on destroying the fabric of society (delete as appropriate) feel like warm, fuzzy friends. Hello fellow humans, aren't we all friendly, human and fun, etc.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...

When paging the old magazines, I noticed that until about the mid-eighties the focus of an ad was on a product. An ad would even boast of the technical specs of a car or an audio system.

A prominent display of people in the process of consuming, or even just people, puts the marketing focus on lifestyle, brand identity and the alignment with some values.

I hate Corporate Memphis the same way I hate the other attempts to hack my reptilian brain and build an emotional connection with a brand.

Marketing checking accounts is hard.

If your company's reach is limitless, you need to appeal to everyone. If your company's offering is wide and disparate, you need a visual brand that offers cohesion. If you want to fit in and belong, you need to employ the same visual vocabulary as everyone else.

This trend is a symptom of the system business currently operates within.

While the article is heavy on philosophical extrapolation, it's pretty light on facts. The original example of this art style was commissioned by Facebook and is called alegría: https://jsweisart.com/facebook-alegria

> “From a design point of view, it’s pretty lazy,” says Hurley.

I love designers criticizing design used for business. It rarely incorporates any perspective on business objectives. As long as the design is achieving its goal then who cares?

Because they are professionals. Software engineers, lawyers, doctors... skilled people who have creative control often put pride into their work as a means of expressing their talent and enthusiasm, even if it doesn’t make a direct tangible difference.

Who cares is the people who have to experience the design which doesn’t stand on its own (i.e. customers or users).

Because design/illustration can be demonstrably meaningful and/or useful and/or informative &c. Whereas this is a nullification: at this point in time [as it reaches a kind of saturation point] it's a mass-produceable toolkit for generating inoffensive fluff to fill space. In the sense that it cannot fail at doing nothing much, then sure, it has succeeded. But the goal is to...do what exactly? It's kitsch. Good design tends to take quite a bit of thought: this takes very little. Hence, lazy.

Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFb7BOI_QFc

Very close to a racist video, this :) But as a colored person, it is just a cultural difference. People just associate certain things with skin color, and depending upon geographical location it can be an advantage or a disadvantage. I was in Greenville SC and they were the warmest people I ever met, but yeah they took their own time to let me in :-)

(if you must ask it was the farmer's market)

I too thought of this video and it is what introduced me to this particular form of "art". It's a good critique.

Reminds me a bit of the infamous Grubhub ad that came out a few months ago[1] - similarities include the color scheme, the checklist approach to racial diversity, and the attempt to project generic inoffensive "fun". The Grubhub ad, at least, is so bad that it's entertaining.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-T3qKl6y-c

Perhaps, in being so widely shared, it has in fact achieved a level of success that is incredibly rare for an advertisement.

The trend is real but it is also pretty innocuous. I know that design people think that these things influence collective consciousness in a deep way but really it is just another cog in the wheel. In my personal experience, the primary reason that design teams prefer this style is that it is able to clearly represent a diverse and inclusive audience. Inclusivity and diversity are very important goals for most American companies. Part of this may be related to certain liberal ideologies but most of this is just about capitalism. America is a diverse country and most American companies also harbor aspirations to serve global markets. Having a simple way to show that your products can solve problems for everyone is just good for business.

It lets companies look diverse without being diverse, yeah.

A subtle distinction here: The goal is not for the company to look diverse but rather for the product/service to appeal to a diverse customer/user base. This is a formidable design challenge. Depicting the full range of human life is not really possible with half a dozen images. The solution that everyone has landed on is to lower the fidelity of the representation. If we get rid of photorealism, 3d features, texture and other high resolution features, then a single illustration can encompass a much greater slice of humanity than a photograph could. I'm sure that there are other solutions to this design problem but I don't think that anything will replace the Memphis aesthetic until people understand the needs that led to its ubiquity. Any alternative aesthetic will need to satisfy the same basic business requirements.

Chicken and egg. If you're a company that isn't very diverse but is trying to change that, a good first step is to present diversity. If that's the ONLY step, then sure go ahead and drag them, but it's not bad on its face.

Find it weird how similar this is to 90s era software box art, things like Adobe Acrobat 5.0 [1]

[1] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/adobe/images/d/da/Adobe_Ac...

Working link: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/adobe/images/d/da/Adobe_Ac...

I think it's really just "pattern matching".

All design after a while is an obnoxious copy of what is popular.

Remember when what used to be popular were giant auto-play videos on the background of Bootstrap/Foundation websites?

Or before that, all the rounded corners and color gradients?

Fads will pass, corporations will soon change to something else.

I was under the impression that Alegria was the name of this latest iteration on flat design: https://buck.co/work/facebook-alegria

Sure Zune and Material were there before, but I only remember feeling alienated by so-bland-it's-unrelatable designs since I started seeing all those Alegria iterated synth-cartoons everywhere.

Alegria or Corp Memphis, seem to have overflowed into children's cartoons, probably for the same reasons, easy to pump out designs, hard to be offended at, generic enough to fit most needs. I find this one particularly flat and bland: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PBE-W1TMeXI

I like this style but in a twisted way. It allows me to immediately detect a low quality stuff produced by numerous (tasteless) companies. This is a strong signal I just cannot ignore. If a company chooses to blindly copycat the templated low quality crap, this says a thousand words.

> the trend has started to consume the visual world at large. It’s also drawing intense criticisms from those within the design world... “It really boils my piss to be honest,” says Jack Hurley, a Leeds-based illustrator... “From a design point of view, it’s pretty lazy,” says Hurley.

Advertising has followed trends for many, many, many decades. There's literally no point in time where it doesn't look "all the same".

Corporate Memphis isn't "lazy", nor does it deserve "intense criticim". It's simply a style that lends itself well to the moment -- it's fresh, innocent, inclusive, simple, positive.

And like all trends, it'll be replaced with the next new trend in advertising soon enough.

This article seems to be reading waaay too much into it.

>Rudnick says that what makes Corporate Memphis particularly insidious is that its worldview is designed to be misleading. “It depicts a world whose problems are already solved, built out of complementary components”

I'm not defending the style but this really seems like a stretch too far.

> The style coincided with an increasingly data-driven and hyper-personalised tech world, while also having a nostalgic, cartoony feel. “I think it's desperate. It's a desperate attempt at trying to be human,” he says.

Long-time illustrator here who has worked for various clients such as WIRED, Slack, etc etc. Here are my two rambly cents:

Firstly, I think this article is almost spot on. One of the major culprits behind this issue of "flat illustration" as I've seen it called is that there is usually a lack of originality being forced onto the illustrator from the hiring companies. Usually this is in the form of "we love what Company X is doing and would love to have something visually similar," and by visually similar, usually what they want is something that's pretty much the same but with a different colour palette. Boo!

But hey, if you're the illustrator here and they're not going to credit your name (which is generally the case with branding related work, such as this flat stuff) ... who gives a shit, right? Take the money and run and watch the world burn with flat illustration. /s

I said "almost spot on" earlier because one thing not mentioned in this article––and this has been my "theory" and those of my illustrator colleagues for years-–is the economic side of it all, and how it has affected illustrative output:

Firstly, know that illustration rates have been pretty stagnant since the 90s and deadlines are getting shorter and shorter due to the demands of real-time publishing. No more waiting for something to go to print, you just schedule a blog post.

Back in the dying era of print (mid-00s), even small illustration gigs could come with generous turnaround times of 3 or 4-ish weeks if you were lucky. Usually a week or two to figure out rough sketches and get approval from the client, and then a week or so to crank out the final art. Maybe you're painting or drawing this on physical media like paper, gouache, watercolour, etc, which comes with fantastic built-in features like texture and brushstrokes, where honestly flat is HARD to pull off.

But today it's more likely you get an email and the client wants sketches for Friday, and final art the following Wednesday. You simply don't have as much time to work on polishing up a nice sketch to turn into a painting; sometimes this stuff just needs straight-up time to massage into place. Instead, you can use the old bucket fill in Photoshop or flat fill in Illustrator, copy paste a few pieces from your own collection of past work perhaps, adjust a few colors and call it a day.

I admit when I first saw this stuff 10 or so years ago, I thought it was bold and graphic and honestly I wouldn't have had the courage to do something so simple; it's a nice shout out to the digital painterliness that is flat vector shapes. But when it becomes this common place ... well, it just looks boring.

Anyway, as much fun as it is to dump time and energy into a drawing, if the requested content is fucking lame and generic and the deadline is short, have fun getting nice original work out of it. Instead, maybe hire an illustrator on the long term and have them develop something truly unique that no one would want to be caught dead copying because it would just look like plagiarism.

It's not all doom and gloom though. Some of this flat stuff can be good! For example, many illustrations on the Apple App Store (on macOS, depending on the day) have a nice level of polish to them that push them past the generic flat style and can feel fresh and new, at least to me as an illustrator, while still satisfying some obvious corporate requests for something safe and predictable.

*edit*: spelings and puncs

*edit edit*: Corporate Memphis is such a dumb name for this. just call it Flat Style as all of the illustratorverse has been calling it for years.

Maybe this is a hot take, but I actually love this artstyle. I love minimalist art/clean vector art in general, and this is more of that, so I'm a big fan. I'll be sad when it stops being trendy.

I do a ton of direct response ad creative. Generally stock photos work really well if chosen with care, but brands shy away from them due to perceived cheapness. Their loss.

Here's another perspective: this type of art style is in my opinion, quite childish and immature. It lacks detail, uses limited colors, and most often depicts people playing, or having fun. To me it represents the on-going "dumbing down" of tech. It shows how tech companies view their customers/users - children who need to be told what to think, what to buy, and how to behave.

What I miss a bit in the article is the acknowledgement that me might have found a simple, efficient and effective communication medium that could be used in several contexts. Although it might be far from perfect and have several drawbacks, I like that we don't need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every single time we have to craft a visual message.

personally I think one of the reasons why it's popular is it is reminiscent of the style of the 1920s, and can thus, with a few tweaks be used to connote a connection to the past as well as implying modernity.

https://www.illustrationhistory.org/images/uploads/held-Life...

https://hprints.com/s_img/s_md/58/58883-lillustration-des-mo...

I can think of lots of reasons why using the 1920s as a visual source would be interesting for designers in this period, so a few people did it and others jumped on (my feeling when I started seeing it around)

I feel this style have the same infamous reputation as Comic Sans font. It isn't a bad style, it's just overused.

Contrast this with S&P ratings’ website. Just feels so much more human. Here’s their careers page.

https://www.spglobal.com/en/careers/overview/

"a few years ago he might have been complaining about the glut of owls and foxes wearing monocles"

foxes with monocles? When was that a fashion? In what context? I am most curious.

'Folk naivete’ definitely seemed to be a cliche style employed to disarm the consumer thinking of themselves as 'individual'.

It was a cutesy art trend. This is the first artist I noticed doing it:

https://berkleyillustration.com/

It spread from there and became ubiquitous, at least in the Pacific Northwest.

Really? I think this might be known as spam.

Really you should blame the popularity of SVG graphics

especially scalable SVG graphics

It's not the popularity of svgs .. it's the need for resolution independent graphics.

https://archive.is/QnhXE

Trends are trendy, film at 11.

So maybe one tenth of one percent of marketing people have an original idea in their heads. This is nothing new.

Trends serve a use, which is to remind us of exactly this fact. Whenever we paeans are told that we can't contribute a product idea, because the big ideas have to come from the big idea people, or that design concepts stem from "research," a trend comes along and reassures us that we're all equals after all.

I think that's probably a bit harsh. Marketing is hard. Try coming up with a new idea for a car advertisement. What can you do that already hasn't been done?

answer: because deep down the majority just want the same bullshit repackaged over and over, look at game franchise it's never as good as previous games ;D

My trick for writing/making ads (mostly GoogleAds, FB Posters etc) is to do the following litmus test:

Let say I'm creating an advert for a 'Real Estate Agency'.

We will call it 'LINDEX', when I'm done with the text, visuals msg etc, I ask myself:

Litmus Test: "If I exchange another company's name and logo (in the same sector) in the ad will it still make sense ? If the answer is yes, then I know my ad is TOO GENERIC/ LAME

Example:

"Real Estate Agency, "LINDEX" we give personal service and listen to the buyer and put you in your dream home."

Now the above is way too generic if I replace our company 'LINDEX' with say "Tom & Jerry Agents" name and logo the ad will still make sense and is the same amount of boring to be honest.

If I change the ad now to:

"Real Estate Agency, 'LINDEX', the only agency that does a lifestyle assessment and put you with-in 10km of 80% of your monthly travel."

Now that is 'unique`ish' and no other agency can just copy our ad and replace it with their name + logo

Tip 2:

I saw it on some Youtube video and If I recall the Youtuber got the idea/tip from his graphic design mentor. I"m not doing the explanation justice but I will try.

When creating posters/ads: Remember the rule of 3.

You should have 3 different 'levels of read' (text+intensity)

Example of a "good" poster about a Jazz Festival:

I'm using HTML convention to illustrate text size + intensity.

* = h1 * = h2 * = h3

* JAZZ MUSICAL * * LIVE CONCERT *

   <pictures/visual>

* WHEN: 30th of Feb at PowerRanger Stadium **

  <pictures/visual>

** Tickets are $100 and children under 12 is free **

Explanation:

The first and foremost text "JAZZ MUSICAL LIVE CONCERT" is aimed at drawing the attention of anyone interested in JAZZ and has the most intensity/size. You should not be able to read the H2/H3 (When/Where/Costs/Details) from far away..

Once we got the Jazz enthusiast hooked and they see the poster and start to walk towards it.

Only then will they see the H2 and H3 text,"When/Where" and how much.

The customer should first be filtered through the H1 as a Jazz-Lover of sorts...

The point is there is no use to focus the attention(use up poster-real-estate) on the When/Where/Cost if we haven't first filtered out the "Non-Jazz-People"

PS. All companies, names and examples are fake :)

Bonus Tip: Funny sells: but you are probably way less funnier than you think to a broader semi-unknown audience.

This style is also called in a derogative way "humans of flat".

It's quite controversial in the design world. Critique of it can also be a bad career move, so people are a bit hush about it.

Thanks for the link, I had no idea that it had a name. The folks on the site that starts with 4 and ends with chan have done some funny parodies of it.

You know, it takes some real work to do a Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman ad. There's a kind of artistic malaise in the modern era.

Admittedly, you see that kind of look in vintage travel and airline posters.

The folks on the site that starts with 4 and ends with chan have done some funny parodies of it.

Thanks for the tip, I rarely visit that site but the parodies (while NSFW and not politically correct, in the usual manner) have been thoroughly, hilariously, entertaining. I think the fact that a style meant to be ultra-politically-correct getting turned into the exact opposite greatly added to the humour.

In the old days smaller companies were confined to commonly used stock photos. Is there nostalgia for those days?

Cool to see Humaaan mentioned. They were one of the first successful startups from Tommy Schlaaang and the Schlaaang Corporation.

layered jungle noises

A tad ironic, as I'm actually browsing this from my schlaaang superseat.

Better question:

Why are you even watching ads?

Due to my ad blockers and not watching TV or listening to the radio, I almost never see or hear ads, so didn't even know that many ads looked the same.

I wish more people used ad blockers, so we can wipe out the cancer that is advertising.

Do you ever go outside?

Yes, but I listen to music or podcasts on headphones so don't hear adverts that might be playing on a radio in stores and avert my gaze from billboards and ads on monitors.

Ok well most people don't want to go to that kind of excessive effort to avoid seeing an advert, so that's why they're seeing adverts.

> multi cultural inclusive visual banality

> It lets companies look diverse

> Not sure what skin color to use? Make them blue

Seeing cartoon SVGs of brown people really hits a nerve for some people. IMO if you walk around the Bay Area the racial distribution is more or less the same as these graphics, so there's really nothing to complain about in that regard. Go buy Russian software if you don't like it.

It’s a valid observation. Don’t you think it’s a bit cynical and calculated to include “diversity” on every single advertising graphic?

Only if you think that "diversity" is somehow abnormal. Why is it a calculated move for companies like Google, whose CEO has brown skin, to have some of their advertisements include brown skinned people? The real cynical move would be to make them all white to appease middle America. Why do you feel the rest of us have to hide our existence to appease you?

I too use my identity as a cudgel, except I am a philosopher.

> Only if you think that "diversity" is somehow abnormal.

I don't, and you chose the value-laden term "abnormal" instead of "demographically atypical". Convenient that you chose the term that I would never use and that makes your argument look less preposterous.

> Why is it a calculated move for companies like Google, whose CEO has brown skin, to have some of their advertisements include brown skinned people?

This implies that brown skin is an indicator of diversity. To use your method of reductio: ...only if you think that diversity is determined by superficial attributes like skin color.

> The real cynical move would be to make them all white to appease middle America.

You one-percenters in the Bay Area must be very insulated; appealing to "diversity" does appease middle America. You could never get away with all white characters now, and I'm sure you know that.

> Why do you feel the rest of us have to hide our existence to appease you?

False attribution.

> This implies that brown skin is an indicator of diversity. To use your method of reductio: ...only if you think that diversity is determined by superficial attributes like skin color.

I started my comment by mentioning skin tone. It's you and the comments I quoted who decided to label this "diversity" with scare quotes, and now you're arguing about the definition of a term you brought into the argument.

> I don't, and you chose the value-laden term "abnormal" instead of "demographically atypical".

That's not a counterargument, you're just nitpicking word choice here. Regardless of what you call it the skin tone distribution matches that of the people who make these graphics. It's also not far off from the national average.

According to Wikipedia 60% of the US Population is non-hispanic white[0]. I imagine the number of Hispanic and Asian people with light skin is around the same as white people with darker skin so this is a good proxy for skin color distribution. If I count one of the first Google Image results for "corporate memphis" about 54/71 = 76% of them have light skin and look white to me. So no, it's only statistically abnormal in that there are probably not enough cartoon brown people.

> I too use my identity as a cudgel, except I am a philosopher.

You either have a poor understanding of philosophy or an inflated ego if you think the semantic games you're playing counts as philosophy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Un...

[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e662715857fa5...

It's similar to the past 2-3 years in television advertisements, where it's also tiresome how one single idea gets copied and copied and copied by every other advertiser. In particular, in the spirit of "inclusiveness", and further driven by BLM, black people are now the default people shown in practically every ad. If aliens were to evaluate the earth based on TV ads, they'd conclude that the USA is about 60% black. Even State Farm insurance has replaced the white Jake character with a new black one (why did Jake have to be replaced? why not simply add a character?). It has become absurd.

Not to knock the motivation, but I am knocking the sheep-like following of one advertiser after the others. For ostensibly creative people, they seem to have very few original ideas among them.

I would argue it started around 2013 or 2014, but we've seen more or less the same thing. I haven't watched TV in a few years, so maybe it's gotten worse.

One thing I always thought was interesting; Apple commercials, which go out of their way to feature many types of racial minorities, do not show any:

- obese people

- weirdly proportioned people

- ugly people

- poor people

- person over 45

- meatheads

- Republican-looking people

- disabilities besides deaf, blind, and mobility, e.g. burn victims

They are into advertising to the groups that will be the best-received for their bottom line. It's no more than that, and it's foolish to think otherwise.

There's a Whose Line Is It Anyway bit from a couple decades ago where Wayne Brady (musically talented, athletic, young, black guy) says "How come there's no one who looks like me on 'Friends'??" The audience says "Aww" in sympathy. And then Colin Mochrie (balding, awkward, white Canadian guy) repeats "How come there's no one who looks like me on 'Friends'??"

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