Corporate Memphis

The tells are consistent enough that you can list them. Figures have no faces, or at most a suggestion of one. Limbs are longer than the bodies they hang off, bend like ribbons rather than at joints, and end without hands. Skin is whatever colour the palette needed, usually lavender, coral, or mint, which sidesteps depicting anyone in particular. Everything is filled flat with no shading and few outlines, props are scaled wrong on purpose (a phone the size of a door, a leaf the size of a person), and the whole thing is drawn from a brand palette of three or four colours plus a soft background blob.

The name is a misnomer that stuck. Memphis proper was the Milan design collective Ettore Sottsass started in 1981, whose furniture was loud postmodern pattern and clashing laminate, and the only real inheritance here is bright flat colour and geometric shape. Facebook’s version, drawn by the studio Buck in 2017 and rolled out across its products, was internally called Alegria, and that name gets used for the whole family. So does “humans of flat”, from the earlier flat illustration wave, and simply “big tech illustration”.

It spread because it solved a real production problem. A company shipping dozens of marketing pages, empty states, and onboarding screens needs illustration that can be drawn by different people, in different countries, without a house painter’s eye, and still look like one set. Flat vector at any scale, a fixed palette, and abstracted humans give exactly that, and the abstraction quietly avoids having to decide who is in every picture. It also sits comfortably in a system built around flat design, because both were answers to the same question about what to do once you have stopped drawing shadows.

The backlash is now the more famous half of the story. Around 2020 the criticism became loud: that the style makes every company look interchangeable and unthreatening, regardless of what the company actually does, and that friendliness applied evenly across a landing page and a layoff announcement is a kind of tone-washing. By 2022 much of tech marketing had moved on to 3D renders, photography, and hand drawn work. It remains a useful reference point, and if you do reach for it, treat the picture as decoration: almost every one of these is decorative and belongs behind an empty alt attribute rather than a description of five faceless people holding an enormous pencil.