Corporate Art Style | Know Your Meme

Reception

The earliest public reactions to the popularization of flat art styles among tech companies are two collections of their examples on social networking community Are.na. On October 31st, 2017, Are.na user S k y e started a collection titled “
Small cartoon people building big interfaces” that received 61 followers in four years.
On April 28th, 2018, Are.na user writer Claire L. Evans started a collection of corporate art style images, coining the term “Corporate Memphis.” The collection (shown below) received over 336 followers in three years.

In June 2018, Twitter account @HumansOfFlat was created, collecting examples of flat art style and criticizing it (tweet examples shown below). The account accumulated nearly 6,000 followers prior to being suspended in February 2020.

On May 23rd, 2019, New Republic magazine design director Lindsay Ballant posted a tweet about similarly styled illustration submissions she had been receiving, posting several examples of the art style.

On August 21st, 2019, Aiga Eye on Design blog posted an article “Don’t Worry, These Gangly-armed Cartoons Are Here to Protect You From Big Tech,” reviewing Alegria and Alegria-inspired art styles.

The term “globohomo art style,” with “globohomo” meaning “globalized homogenization,” has been used in reference to the art style since May 2020, particularly on imageboards.

On August 26th, Kiwi Farms user Pissmaster created a thread about the art style.

On February 6th, 2021, YouTube channel Solar Sands posted a video about the art style that received over 2.1 million views in three weeks (shown below).