Corporate Memphis

Illustration in Corporate Memphis style from humaaans design library

Corporate Memphis (alternative names: Globol homogenization or Globohomo, Alegria art, big tech art, flat art, or corporate artstyle) is an art style named after the Memphis Group that features flat areas of color and geometric elements. Widely associated with Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it has been met with a polarized response, with criticism focusing on its use in sanitizing corporate communication, as well as being seen as visually offensive, insincere, pandering and over-saturated, though some illustrators have defended the style, pointing at what they claim to be its art-historical legitimacy.

Origins

Flat art developed out of the rise of vector graphic programs, and a nostalgia for mid-century modern illustration. It began to trend in editorial illustration and especially the tech industry, which relied on simple, scalable illustrations to fill white space and add character to apps and web pages. The style was widely popularized when Facebook introduced Alegria, an illustration system commissioned from design agency Buck Studios and illustrator Xoana Herrera in 2017.

The name "Corporate Memphis" originated from the title of an Are.na board that collected early examples, and is a reference to the Memphis Group, a 1980s design group known for bright colors, childish patterns, and geometric shapes. The style itself was inspired by a synthesis of elements spanning the 20th-century, including the Art Deco style of the 1920s, futurism in interior design from the Atomic Age, and color and patterns from the Pop Art movement.

Visual characteristics

Corporate Memphis style artwork featuring characters with blue and purple skintones

Common motifs are flat human characters in action, with disproportionate features such as long and bendy limbs, small torsos, minimal or no facial features, and bright colors without any blending. Facebook's Alegria uses non-representational skin colors such as blues and purples in order to feel universal, though some artists working in the style opt for more realistic skin colors and features to show diversity. However, such style has overall been criticised for tokenism and feeling inauthentic.

Corporate Memphis is materially quick, cheap and easy to produce, and thus appealing to companies; programs such as Adobe Illustrator can produce such designs rapidly.

Reception

The official 2024 Diada de Sant Jordi illustrations from the City Council of Barcelona, in Catalonia, were entirely made with Corporate Memphis by the local artist Pau Gasol Valls. They were fiercely criticized by multiple social, cultural and political segments due their strong depersonalization and loss of identity traits, such as the omission of the senyera, which is ubiquitous in the city's streets during that day.

Once Facebook adopted the style, the sudden ubiquity of vector graphics led to a critical backlash. The style has been criticized both professionally and popularly (including in myriad internet memes) for being overly minimalistic, generic, lazy, overused, and attempting to sanitise public perception of big tech companies by presenting human interaction in utopian optimism. Criticism of the art style is often rooted in larger anxieties about the creative industry under capitalism and neoliberalism. Some have argued that, despite the criticism, Corporate Memphis has unexpected depth and variety, and deserves to be understood on its own merits beyond an association with tech dystopias.

See also

• Material design, a Google-derived design language linked to Corporate Memphis
• Frutiger Aero, a prominent design style preceding Corporate Memphis that embraced contrasting skeuomorphism
• Flat design
• Postmodern art
• Metamodernism
• Pop art
• Capitalist realism