Credit: Humaaans.com / protocol
Does this illustration look familiar? If you have spent any time online in the past five years, odds are you’ve come across it. It’s called “Corporate Memphis,” though it’s now so ubiquitous in brand guides for a certain type of company, that most people just refer to it as the “tech aesthetic.”
Like anything popular, part of the reason for its widespread use is its effectiveness. Under Corporate Memphis guidelines, “human figures are ethnically ambiguous, often drawn with blue or purple skin and minimal features; they all seem to live in a parallel universe where nothing bad happens and mass celebrations break out over the latest banking app.” One can imagine the appeal such a framework provides for a financial services company: we’re friendly, we’re fun, we’re human, just like you.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with an upbeat and harmless brand aesthetic, but it’s just so boring. Designers and illustrators are capable of much more when given the opportunity.
We are biased, of course. We create real-world expressions of brand identities (aka “signs”). We take illustrations, drawings, logos, typography, colors and turn them into things that you can touch, see, and feel. It’s easy for us to appreciate the artistry of good designers and illustrators because we know that a good illustrator can render a sharper critique with five colors than we ever could with five paragraphs.
Credit: Claire Turner
See?
Illustration by Jonathan Djob Nkondo / The New Yorker
25 years and $10 billion in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch later this year try to try answer some of the deepest questions yet asked about the nature of the universe. and
Here's a sign that you're in New England:
...and here's a sign that you used too many balloons:
