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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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...

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