A Brief Overview of Big Tech Illustration: Flat Design, Corporate Memphis, and Alegria
By: Anna Xing
Tags: Technology, Marketing, Design, Illustration

As the name suggests, “Corporate Memphis” is derivative of Memphis. It references the bright colours, high contrast, and bold, geometric shapes and squiggles of its predecessor. Corporate Memphis isn’t a formal design term — it’s more of a cynical nickname. It seems that the primary distinguishing feature between Memphis and Corporate Memphis is the context in which the style is used. Since the Corporate flavour is specific to commercial contexts, it’s often toned down and standardized so as to remain functional and unintrusive. The colour palette is tamer, certain image guidelines are codified, and the array of possible patterns is restricted to a tighter range.

Header illustration for an article on the Slack blog. Source: Slack

Spotify billboard ad from the end of 2017. Source: Smart Insights

Corporate Memphis has skyrocketed in digital design popularity in recent years. Just take a look at the libraries and interfaces of modern UI design tools, from Adobe XD to Figma to Canva, and you’ll see the distinctive mark of Memphis in the digital age.

Figma landing page. Source: Figma

Alegria

This brings us to Alegria — the iconic progenitor of the quirky tech people-figures we now see everywhere. Officially, Alegria is an illustration system created for Facebook around 2017 by the design agency BUCK. As explained by the agency itself, Alegria derives its name from the Spanish word for “joy,” a fitting name for a style which radiates playfulness and positivity.

Illustrations for Facebook Alegria. Source: BUCK

It fits neatly into the trendy look of Corporate Memphis. Note the flat, minimal design, geometric shapes, uniform line widths, and vivid colours. It challenges realism by warping perspective and scale, allowing it to translate 3D dynamism into 2D graphics. Xoana Herrera, an illustrator who worked on Alegria within the BUCK team, explains that “characters are stylized and not anatomically precise” and that they are “designed for expression rather than individual identity.”

Today, the numerous spin-offs Alegria has spawned are a testament to its success. It serves its purpose extremely well. On the branding end, simple shapes and lines make it highly extensible. It’s distinctive, and the fundamental elements of the style are easy to comprehend. Designers can quickly adapt it into their own work — which is not to say that it was effortlessly conceptualized, but rather that its creators were mindful of the many use cases it would need to fulfill.

And on the consumer end, Alegria projects an image of inclusivity, approachability, and groundedness. It injects an opaque Big Tech entity with a warm, friendly facelift, highlighting its human factors over its sometimes-nebulous, often-controversial technology itself. Most of Alegria’s artificial skin tones and exaggerated body shapes are so intensely stylized that they sidestep issues of representation altogether. After all, if nobody is represented in the literal sense, then everybody is represented in the abstract, and by extension, nobody is technically excluded.

These illustrations reflect a fanciful diversity that exists only in the imagination. Rarely do they highlight examples of natural visual differences, leaving the onus of envisioning a diverse cast squarely on the user. For instance, someone who pictures white as the default ethnicity likely won’t think much differently when presented with a purple-skinned figure without any visible ethnic markers. The same goes for gender, disability, age, etc.

This collectivist look in itself doesn’t reflect sinister intentions on the designer’s part. Neither does the homogeneity of tech illustration. Again, Alegria’s flexibility is its strength. When creating for a company like Facebook whose users literally span the globe, it seems logical to keep designs abstract enough to represent anybody at all. In this case, the ambiguity of character identities is meant to be a feature, not a bug.

Of course, many designers who work with flat, Alegria-adjacent, or Memphis-like styles reflect varying degrees of reality in their work, and there’s a lot of stylistic variation within this realm. For example, illustrator Jennifer Hom created a unique illustration system for Airbnb which draws upon flat Memphis design, yet intentionally avoids the anonymity that plagues many corporate illustrations. Despite their visual similarities, Hom’s approach to character creation is the fundamental opposite of Alegria, as her system embraces individuality while the latter avoids it. A similar sentiment about using real people as references is also echoed in this article from Meg Robichaud, which discusses diversity in illustration at Shopify.

Don’t worry, be happy?

Overall, Alegria is a lovely, expressive illustration system, but it has its shortcomings. Under certain circumstances, it can even feel malicious. The way I see it, two factors make the modern proliferation of Alegria-lite so uncomfortable.

First, Alegria’s quick replicability and ease of use has resulted in the rise of generic illustration libraries like humaaans, which provide stock images for the era of flat design. Once you’ve seen the millionth landing page featuring some variation of the same standard figure, these graphics start calling to mind the cold, impersonal metrics by which companies often define their consumers, as well as the half-hearted corporate insistence that those consumers are, in fact, more than just numbers to crunch. I suppose that may just be my pessimism.

Far more disturbing, however, is the political context in which Alegria is used. Its principles of utopic optimism and pseudo-inclusivity gloss over the real ethical issues that tech companies are struggling to address, often in tandem with language so friendly that it borders on infantilizing.

The list of controversies goes on and on. Regulators evidently can’t keep up with the fast pace of tech.

Our days of unfettered public trust in Big Tech are long gone, but companies won’t stop trying to bring us back — and the playful, innocuous aesthetics of Alegria and Corporate Memphis are just one small, highly visible part of these efforts.

I’m a perpetual skeptic of marketing in all forms. Despite myself, I still marvel at the wide range of artwork that’s emerged from current trends, as well as the fascinating history and influences behind it all. And to be fair, I think most of us — myself included — would rather rest easy with pretty graphics like Alegria and friendly UIs over raw brutalist interfaces, ethics be damned. For better or for worse, digital design trends are already shifting from flat design to who-knows-what-else (neomorphism and 3D renders, maybe?), and some of the images in this article are no longer in use on company sites. Whatever comes next, it’ll tell us more about the role that tech plays in our environment and how these companies seek to grow in the near future.

For more information about Alegria, see this Eye on Design article by Rachel Hawley.