Although far too late to make a contemporary response to it, I've developed a strange, almost visceral aversion to what some call "Corporate Memphis" or the "Big Tech Art Style"—you've seen it: those flat, colorful illustrations of disproportioned humans with tiny heads and noodle limbs, existing in abstract spaces, often engaged in vague collaborative activities. They populate your banking app, your workplace software, your health insurance portal, and in extreme cases, your streets.

Whenever I encounter these illustrations, typically on business sites, I wonder "did somebody recently decide to use this? Or am I looking at a forgotten product of the sweeping monolith of years ago?", and either way I wish for it to finally, finally disappear.

Some people who know me roll their eyes if I so much look disapprovingly at an example in the wild, but I believe there's room to challenge this style when it exists not as art but as a product. This isn't wholly a condemnation of its artistic merit (though I'm sure you can gather that I'm not a fan, either), rather a systemic critique focusing on corporate deception.

It's embedded everywhere

While past its heyday, you're sure to stumble across it:

• Flat, vibrant colors without shadows or depth
• Disproportionate human figures with small heads and elongated limbs (this description sounds quite fun, actually)
• Abstract, contextless environments
• Simplified, often faceless characters engaged in ambiguous activities
• A sense of weightless, frictionless existence

The name "Corporate Memphis" itself is a sardonic nod to the Memphis Group, the 1980s Italian design collective known for its colorful, geometric furniture and accessories. But where Memphis design was revolutionary and divisive, Corporate Memphis is engineered precisely not to offend or challenge.

This is the first clue to understanding both the style's ubiquity and its peculiar emptiness: it represents design by committee, by focus group, by risk-aversion algorithm. It's the visual equivalent of hotel lobby music, muzak—present but undemanding of attention.

The uncanny valley of Happy Capitalism

What I find most unsettling about Corporate Memphis isn't its flatness or simplified forms—aesthetic minimalism has a rich history from Bauhaus to Swiss typography. Rather, it's the particular emotional register the style employs: a relentless, frictionless cheerfulness that feels fundamentally dishonest about human experience.

These illustrations depict a world where work is always collaborative, technology always empowering, and human interaction always frictionless. Bodies bend in impossible ways to collaborate on abstract projects. Diversity is represented through varying skin tones while cultural and class differences vanish. Problems appear as cute puzzles to be solved rather than structural challenges to be confronted.

The style performs a kind of emotional labor on behalf of corporations, presenting their services not as transactional relationships but as utopian social spaces. Your health insurance denial isn't a potentially devastating event impacting the physical and fiscal wellbeing of your family—it's just another cheerful interaction in the land of bendy people!

This aesthetic gaslighting creates a cognitive dissonance between the actual experience of navigating bureaucratic systems and the visual language used to represent them. I'm all for cheery murals, but it makes me feel near infantized when presented with colorful, bubbly, floaty people everywhere I turn.

Hardly two-dimensional

What makes Corporate Memphis particularly egregious to those with an eye for design history is its ahistorical quality—its peculiar flattening of time itself.

Design movements typically emerge from specific cultural contexts, philosophical perspectives, and technological conditions. Bauhaus responded to industrialization with its form-follows-function ethos. Psychedelic art reflected 1960s consciousness expansion. Punk graphics embodied anarchic rejection of commercial polish.

Corporate Memphis, by contrast, exists in a historical vacuum—deliberately severed from cultural referents that might challenge or complicate its frictionless optimism. Its characters float in contextless non-spaces, untethered from history, politics, or material conditions. This isn't merely an aesthetic choice but an ideological one—a visual representation of what philosopher and political theorist Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism," (although he did not invent the term) where alternatives to the current economic system become literally unimaginable.

The style's historical amnesia pairs perfectly with Silicon Valley's longstanding tendency to present itself as beyond politics (this ambiguity has been shedding recently, for better or worse)—as merely providing neutral tools rather than reshaping social relations. Both represent strategic erasures of context.

It all blends together

Perhaps most concerning is how this corporate aesthetic has colonized our visual imagination. The visual language of the attention economy represents a horrible scheme of palatable slop designed to hook your attention just long enough for you to subconsciously think "funny silly colors!" and move on.

When a single visual style dominates digital spaces, it shapes not just what we see but how we think. The homogenization of digital aesthetics represents a narrowing of possibilities—a corporate monoculture replacing the diverse visual ecosystems that once characterized different domains of life. Hell, I'm complicit: even the default theme of this site may as well be used for some page tailored for shareholders to catch up on KaliserCorp™ updates.

What do you suggest then, Mr. Hypocrite?

You got me. I'm not here to advocate a global effort to eradicate art I deem uninspired. I also realize that I'm shooing away a style already walking out the front door. Independent from its Big Tech associations, it may as well just be another art style. I can't complain about that in the slightest; it's absolutely a legitimate form of expression and I hope my complaints don't come across as contrary to that. I definitely wouldn't be writing about a specific design and how much I loathe its existence just because I don't fancy its aesthetic. There's, very oddly, a mural onto brick in this style in a city center I frequent; I wouldn't push for its destruction. I merely wish to untangle corporate dishonesty from its image.

What would alternatives look like? Perhaps they would acknowledge friction, complication, and the genuine challenges of human experience. They might embrace specific cultural and historical contexts rather than floating in abstract non-space. They might represent bodies with weight, boundaries, and limitations rather than infinitely flexible appendages.

Most radically, they might acknowledge that not every human interaction is improved by corporate mediation—that sometimes the appropriate visual language for frustrating experiences is one that acknowledges frustration rather than painting it in cheerful hues.

I don't claim to know how this transformation would occur. I also realize the wild impracticality of prioritizing high-quality graphics over basic functionality online, Yet, I don't think that discredits longing for visual honesty. Not necessarily gritty realism or high art, but simply graphics that don't actively misrepresent the nature of the transaction occurring, or, at the least, exist solely to fill empty space on a corporate site.

Perhaps that's the core of my objection: Corporate Memphis isn't just aesthetically bland but functionally deceptive—a visual language that systematically misrepresents human experience to serve corporate interests. Its flatness isn't merely stylistic but existential—a deliberate flattening of the emotional and political dimensions of life into a single, marketable plane.

In that sense, my visceral reaction might not be aesthetic snobbery after all (though, I would understand if the accusations continued), but a legitimate response to visual manipulation—my perceptual system correctly identifying something fundamentally dishonest in the way these images represent the world. Not all aesthetic judgments are merely matters of taste; some are matters of truth.