TIL that corporate blandness had a name.
I think it had it’s place as inoffensive background filler but obviously was overdone.
AI slop is usually so out of place everywhere and it’s quickly gone straight to abused.
ah but what if AI slop Corporate Memphis??
actually that mostly looks accurate lmao except the leaf growing out of the window sill, and the space between blue shirt’s armpit area should probably be white
If it didn’t just mess up, maybe that was intended to be his chair?
could be yea, I think a human artist would have made that more obvious to look intentional, like have the chair poking out to his side and above his shoulder
Reject Corporate Memphis, embrace Frutiger Aero
I never knew either of those things had a name until this thread.
… I put too much effort into this, I’ll have to keep it in my reaction images folder
This is my favourite thing I’ve seen today
That’s why they say “hell is a bottomless pit”.
No matter how bad it gets, things can ALWAYS get worse.
I’ve thought a lot about why “corporate Memphis” sucks so much. I think it’s because it comes across as incredibly ingenuine. It communicates a Utopian world free of race and gender gaps, which is demonstrably not the case in reality. In a way, the AI art is more genuine. “We don’t give a fuck, neither do you, buy our stuff”. I feel it speaks to an overall nihilism with the world. I think it’s a part of the disillusionment with the “liberal elite” that we find on the left (and honestly, probably the right too). Corporate Memphis is Nancy Pelosi. AI art is JD Vance. The fact we’re yearning for the former shows how terrible the latter really is.
In my opinion, both Memphis and AI art serve one purpose - to discourage people from thinking for themselves, just in different ways.
Memphis tries to do that by being so inoffensive it becomes background noise of unrealistic features and colors that strip any personality away.
AI art is in turn like art of any authoritarian regime - it must convey a propaganda message, and it should do it so clearly, that even simplest organism can get the message, so yeah - the “art” part is basically lost in the process. And with AI you have a tool to do just that - machine to create amalgamation of images beholder has already seen, essentially also becoming a background noise.
Hmm good analysis
That was a complete coincidence I posted the Corporate Memphis Saturn Devouring His Son picture as well.
I’ve been commenting “ai slop” on just about every AI ad I get which has led to some of the advertisers looking at my account/stories and commenting on my posts
But guess what? It’s not stopping me!
What are they commenting though ? Do they seem angry?
They’re not angry, to me it feels like a “look at what I can do” but maybe I’m just projecting
No, YOU’RE SLOP!
Maybe I am slop, but at least I’m flesh and bones slop! My incorrect perspective and extra digit laden art uses significantly less water!
Yes. Yes… You see how you slop.
We heard your feedback, and decided to fulfill your request and use AI-slopped corporate memphis
You’re welcome
monkey paw finger curls
OK, now you’re just rubbing the “plagiarism” in my face :P
Lol, I guess it left an impression hours earlier, and I have a goldfish memory… Whoops.
You got lucky, someone got got by a repost of my memes 11 months later.
I’d say I’m missing some context here, but then I’d pass for an LLM asking for more tokens or whatever idk
the links are there, just click them.
2 many linx 4 u : I made a meme, someone responded to the meme. I reposted the meme in response to a post 11 months later, and the same person responded with the same ideas. When I pointed it out they got embarrassed.
I was just making a joke about LLMs, but I did (
- follow the links
- look at both of your post and comment histories
- make a half-assed attempt at matching timestamps
- give up after a few seconds
) out of curiosity; thanks for the TL;DR
Honestly, I hate that corporate art style so much that I still like ai slop better
I hope people are starting to realize why software engineers don’t handle UX design and why your standard issue middle aged person was not limited by their lack of graphics design skill to create an ad.
FYI business owners. You give me slop advertising I will give you no money or time.
The ai slop is closer to comic sans clipart slop and easier to block out than tiny head deformed monstrosities.
I hate corporate memphis so fucking much that I’d reverse this meme.
Search engines are not really helping me here. Does anyone have real world examples from companies the general public knows that incorporates corporate Memphis? I don’t really remember seeing it that often and I feel like maybe I’m on crazy pills
For an example of what these illustrations evolved into look at Firefox.com. But overall they have died not because of AI Slop, but because they got stale and any hangover over the last couple years was from “pre-built” templates.
From personal experience I’d see it in PowerPoints, business to business (B2B) marketing, and a lot of SaS or digital tech products.
A lot of companies in those spaces went abstract or geometric and phased stock photos of people laughing at nothing back into their marketing.
The stock images of people is what these Memphis stick figures replaced because it was easier to spin things up quickly without agonizing over getting photographic diversity, which was kind of a driver at the time.
It’s my job to keep an eye on trends.
I thought the illustrations on firefox.com looked quite good?
They are good. The illustration style that was dominated by these Memphis people for areas that still need some illustrative “fun” has shifted to gradients and more color. The roots of simplistic illustration are still there, just improved.
This too will get stale. Design trends used to last close to a decade, than down to 5 years around the 2000s. Now it’s more like maybe 2 years before everyone gets bored. That’s only going to accelerate.
But as the cycle goes around and around, it always seems to comeback to swiss design. Modified of course, but the base DNA is always there because it’s what all us designers had beaten into us as visual communicators.
All this Memphis, flat design, geometric bullshit is dressing on that basis that still works. Because at the Bauhaus school they looked closely at the psychology of visual communication and recorded what works and why to be an authority on the subject.
At the end of the day, a design is a failure if it doesn’t communicate to the viewer. Everything else consumers see are distractions marketing VPs and CEOs feel like they need because they “paid good money for something NEW”.
