I didn’t know what this crap:
was called. It’s “Corporate Memphis”. According to the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook and Reservoir of Inexhaustible Knowledge, “The name Corporate Memphis originated from the title of an Are.na board that collected early examples, and is a reference to the Memphis Group, a 1980s design group known for bright colors, childish patterns, and geometric shapes.”. Why “Memphis”, when the group was composed entirely of Italians? JWGRIK explains,
The inspiration behind naming themselves “Memphis” came about during their first meeting when Bob Dylan’s record “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” had been playing repeatedly in the background. For [founder Ettore] Sottsass, the name “Memphis” represented two things: a city in Tennessee, and ancient Egypt’s capital city. The group of designers then went ahead and used the ambiguity behind the name “Memphis” to represent and symbolise their ambiguous design philosophies of furniture, objects and textiles.
It will be interesting to see what the advent of image generation tools such as DALL-E 2 do to the market for illustration in publishing.