Corporate Memphis
flat, geometric art style, widely used in Big Tech illustrations
Corporate Memphis, also known as Alegria, is an art style that features minimalism, flat elements, bright, solid colors, and cartoon-like figures with disproportionate limbs and lack of (smaller) details on larger figures. Named after the Memphis Group, an Italian design group, the style became popular after Facebook introduced it in 2017 under the name Alegria. It has since been associated with corporate Big Tech in the late 2010s and early 2020s, having been used by companies such as Google, Slack, and WeTransfer. The style has received a polarized reception, with some designers criticizing it for its small color palette and describing it as lazy, while others have defended it on the basis of its depth and variety.
History
The term Corporate Memphis was coined by Mike Merrill. The name originated from the title of an Are.na board that collected early examples, and is a reference to the Memphis Group, a now-defunct 1980s Italian design group known for bright colors, childish patterns, and geometric shapes.
The style dates to 2013, when Apple Inc. switched from skeuomorphism to flat design. However, the modern-day style was created on Facebook in 2017 under the name Alegria (Spanish for 'joy') by the media agency Buck. The style became popular in the late 2010s and began to be referred to as "globohomo" (global homogenization), Corporate Memphis, or "corporate tech style".
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This entry incorporates text from “Corporate Memphis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.