This is something that's been bugging me for a while that I could never put a label on. It appears "Corporate Memphis" [1] is a popular catchall term for this style. I think the comparison is apt because not only do they both share an affinity for the hypercolorful and simple geometric forms - they also both strike me as something that you can immediately place as the product of a certain time, which is really just a nice way for saying this stuff is going to look super dated just like the works of the original Memphis Design Movement [2].
Web 2.0 already looks insanely dated, I think we're turning another corner right now as well with Material.
It's pretty fun to click through bootstrap 1-4 and see some changes like the buttons slowly lose their gradient then their outline until by 4 they are just totally flat:
I think "simple shapes and a pared-down color palette" is actually a better descriptor than I used. Even though the palette drawn from in both styles is limited I think there's still a heavy emphasis on color, if that makes any sense.
I wouldn't describe either style as dull or muted, I think in this sense the "pared-down" palette refers to the lack of shading or gradients in many of these designs.
No Thanks, I Fucking Hate, Loathe, and Despise It.
I’m a child of the 80s, I love Alessi design, but I think maybe this guy would have done the world a favor if he had left the planet by the end of the 70’s.
This style isn't just vector art trash using canned tools. A lot of artists are painting this way in gouache and murals. It looks simple, but that's the effect of good composition and design. I can guarantee that this art is not simple to create. Take procreate for a spin and let me know how it goes. If you see this and say, gosh there's a lot of this out there, it must be mass market garbage, then you'd be right at home with people complaining about art nouveau 150 years ago. I don't paint in this style, but I appreciate it as part of the zeitgeist. If you don't like it, paint something else and put it out there for people to write articles about.
Agreed. I'm rather stunned that the sentence "Virtually anyone can produce professional-looking artwork using illustration software and digital tools." would be written by a professional design critic. It seems like a shockingly naive assertion for a professional to actually commit to print.
Like user rendall, I was appalled by the article's insinuation anyone can produce this art. The examples the author gives can definitely NOT be done by someone without artistic skill.
I'm not sure I understand the article. This is an art style which is currently fashionable. Complaining about art styles mankind finds outrageous has been a constant since the first caveman slapped pigments with his hand on his cave wall.
Most comments are quite negative, but I think an important reason is that the "flat" style looks pretty good on a screen and feels "native" to the digital media in a way watercolors or pencil or oil paint just doesn't. It is basically the natural evolution from simple icons. Sure most of it is generic and derivative, but this is true for any style.
It is typical that a new media try to emulate older, more prestigious media. Digital lack the physicality, so there was a long infatuation with trying to make it look more "physical" - shadows, texture and so on. Now it seems the tide have turned and print magazines try to look more digital.
> The answer boils down to three T’s: technology, taste, and terrible pay.
I don't think technology has much to do with it. Digital illustration has been around for decades now, and technological improvements have made it easier to make complex, sophisticated art and reproduce all traditional techniques. So, neither the timeline nor the trend match.
The pay, sure, everyone always wants to make more money. I believe it's a factor. But it's been half a century since the 1970s. The style transition seems to have been too abrupt to be driven by long-term salary trends. Besides, it's hard to believe that the people making Corporate Memphis for, say, Facebook are so severely underpaid that no other style is feasible. In fact, if you have the money to pay your designers more, wouldn't you want to have them do something different, to stand out?
So it's taste, then. But I don't think it's a pure accident of fashion. This style aligns very well with the cultural moment: the infantilization of academic/corporate/consumer culture, the triumph of safety and risk-aversion, an antipathy towards the (conventionally attractive) human form, and an ever more homogenized culture facing an ever more heterogeneous public. If you were a designer trying to capture the zeitgeist, could you do better?
I have a real yearning to see some early 1990s corporate illustration now. It seemed like back then the motif of large framed doll people made of simple pencil shaded 3D effect geometry was very common.
I can even picture in my mind’s eye a Netgear hub being packaged in a box showing two generic figures skipping over some hillscape, achieving corporate goals together. Maybe even Windows 3.11 used the style?
I have no idea how to find an example though. Any help would be appreciated.
Noooo.... that 90's style annoyed me to no end as it was just as cookie-cutter copy as the current crop of vector art. For some reason there was one thing which made is especially annoying: the fact that nearly every person in those illustration was wearing a neck tie, often flying out at odd angles, often garishly coloured. Oversized besuited- and -tied figurines flying over hills and dales, I can still see them...
The original illustrator who launched the style and all the others who copied it probably thought it made the figures look like 'professionals' but for me it just made them look like the superfluous managers who, like veritable parasites, had hooked themselves into the system and started extracting nourishment. Maybe the fact that I worked at a big telco which had created a separate business unit for that new-fangled internet thing had something to do with it? We were placed in a different building and had as little contact as possible with the mothership to make sure its stifling culture would not hinder us in making a place for ourselves on the 'net. When it became clear that the 'net was where it was at those manager-types started flooding in - and the early developer types started flooding out, me amongst them.
If you look through the last few centuries of illustration, it has always been subject to fashionable trends that are informed by the processes used to create and publish illustrations in their respective eras. There have always been distinctive and original illustrators, but the other 90% are usually playing to style trends. Ultimately concept is king and the style is malleable.
These days illustrations are much more commonly produced with fast turnaround time and smaller budgets. The print industry ain't what it used to be. Illustrations are now viewed on multiple platforms and have to be readable and graphic when only a couple inches wide while (in some cases) still looking good on a magazine rack.
I would say illustration went through it's most diverse and creative phase in the late 90s up to the iphone. Before Steve Jobs killed the print industry there was just such a rich tapestry of career illustrators making a comfortable living producing polished and distinctive work.
The industry peaked in size sometime in the 50s, but it was more quantity than quality. While at the top you had superstars like Rockwell, Layendecker and Artsybashef, you also had massive industrial scale illustration houses hiring kids out of high school and training them up quickly to produce stylistically rigid and uniform illustration work at scale and for low pay. It wasn't a whole lot different than the way the Animation and video game industry works today.
Art always changes, and art critics always complain when it does, and complain when it doesn't. Illustration is simply art on a shoestring. No one is able to afford a Normal Rockwell or hire David Hockney given publishing makes so little revenue today, so finding a way to make a graphical point quickly is no less an artistic achievement. Technology allows today things that no artist from the past could do, and there is no reason to not take advantage of it. At one point painting with oils was new, painting in many colors was new, printing in color was new, even thinking of art in the abstract was new; so art changes to take advantage.
I don't think that Le Monde illustration looks quite like the other pictures. That is to say I can imagine someone making some crudely drawn approximation of the other pictures and then getting them to snap into place as required but the Le Monde has details I think would need more than snapping.
At any rate I'm not sure if the sameness of style is all down to lack of talent, there has been sameness of style in past generations as well.
Readit News
[1] https://www.are.na/claire-l-evans/corporate-memphis
[2] https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/23/15864234/furniture-memphis-...
It's pretty fun to click through bootstrap 1-4 and see some changes like the buttons slowly lose their gradient then their outline until by 4 they are just totally flat:
https://bootstrapdocs.com/v1.4.0/examples/hero.html
https://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/examples/hero.html
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/examples/jumbotron/
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/examples/jumbotron/
but "Corporate Memphis" is such a great definition! “Tracking the illustration style of choice in our tech dystopia” ahaha
“ The vector-based style, characterized by flat colors, simple shapes and a pared-down color palette...”
The Industry Standard, Red Herring and Business 2.0 probably had some effect on its taking root.
I wouldn't describe either style as dull or muted, I think in this sense the "pared-down" palette refers to the lack of shading or gradients in many of these designs.
I’m a child of the 80s, I love Alessi design, but I think maybe this guy would have done the world a favor if he had left the planet by the end of the 70’s.
I'm not sure I understand the article. This is an art style which is currently fashionable. Complaining about art styles mankind finds outrageous has been a constant since the first caveman slapped pigments with his hand on his cave wall.
Really, what is new with this article?
It is typical that a new media try to emulate older, more prestigious media. Digital lack the physicality, so there was a long infatuation with trying to make it look more "physical" - shadows, texture and so on. Now it seems the tide have turned and print magazines try to look more digital.
the biggest reasons is skills and cost.
Very few people can actually do digital watercolor, pencil, oil, collage, etc. well. Those take years and years of training.
Flat illustrations are no picnic, but they're much more forgiving to novice.
I don't think technology has much to do with it. Digital illustration has been around for decades now, and technological improvements have made it easier to make complex, sophisticated art and reproduce all traditional techniques. So, neither the timeline nor the trend match.
The pay, sure, everyone always wants to make more money. I believe it's a factor. But it's been half a century since the 1970s. The style transition seems to have been too abrupt to be driven by long-term salary trends. Besides, it's hard to believe that the people making Corporate Memphis for, say, Facebook are so severely underpaid that no other style is feasible. In fact, if you have the money to pay your designers more, wouldn't you want to have them do something different, to stand out?
So it's taste, then. But I don't think it's a pure accident of fashion. This style aligns very well with the cultural moment: the infantilization of academic/corporate/consumer culture, the triumph of safety and risk-aversion, an antipathy towards the (conventionally attractive) human form, and an ever more homogenized culture facing an ever more heterogeneous public. If you were a designer trying to capture the zeitgeist, could you do better?
I can even picture in my mind’s eye a Netgear hub being packaged in a box showing two generic figures skipping over some hillscape, achieving corporate goals together. Maybe even Windows 3.11 used the style?
I have no idea how to find an example though. Any help would be appreciated.
Probably not what you had a hazy memory of but probably very close. I love this style too.
Edit: It's one of my favourite non-digital aesthetics in computing history, together with some of the stuff DEC did.
Edit 2: Another minor reason I'm somewhat familiar with that style is because MUMPS vendor InterSystems kept some variants of it around for longer than reasonable: https://www.slideserve.com/broderick/introduction-to-intersy... which I just adore.
And just for another search, Microsoft 1996 yields this here thumbnail: https://i.imgur.com/wlr0U6j.png for this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gMC_uFdcWE
The original illustrator who launched the style and all the others who copied it probably thought it made the figures look like 'professionals' but for me it just made them look like the superfluous managers who, like veritable parasites, had hooked themselves into the system and started extracting nourishment. Maybe the fact that I worked at a big telco which had created a separate business unit for that new-fangled internet thing had something to do with it? We were placed in a different building and had as little contact as possible with the mothership to make sure its stifling culture would not hinder us in making a place for ourselves on the 'net. When it became clear that the 'net was where it was at those manager-types started flooding in - and the early developer types started flooding out, me amongst them.
These days illustrations are much more commonly produced with fast turnaround time and smaller budgets. The print industry ain't what it used to be. Illustrations are now viewed on multiple platforms and have to be readable and graphic when only a couple inches wide while (in some cases) still looking good on a magazine rack.
I would say illustration went through it's most diverse and creative phase in the late 90s up to the iphone. Before Steve Jobs killed the print industry there was just such a rich tapestry of career illustrators making a comfortable living producing polished and distinctive work.
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/62/b9/ce62b9cf9c349ea81018...
[2] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/67/d5/3c67d54d2fe785c773d2...
At any rate I'm not sure if the sameness of style is all down to lack of talent, there has been sameness of style in past generations as well.