> The answer boils down to three T’s: technology, taste, and terrible pay. I don't think technology has much to do with it. Digital illustration has been aroun

> The answer boils down to three T’s: technology, taste, and terrible pay. I don't think technology has much to do with it. Digital illustration has been around for decades now, and technological improvements have made it easier to make complex, sophisticated art and reproduce all traditional techniques. So, neither the timeline nor the trend match. The pay, sure, everyone always wants to make more money. I believe it's a factor. But it's been half a century since the 1970s. The style transition seems to have been too abrupt to be driven by long-term salary trends. Besides, it's hard to believe that the people making Corporate Memphis for, say, Facebook are so severely underpaid that no other style is feasible. In fact, if you have the money to pay your designers more, wouldn't you want to have them do something different, to stand out? So it's taste, then. But I don't think it's a pure accident of fashion. This style aligns very well with the cultural moment: the infantilization of academic/corporate/consumer culture, the triumph of safety and risk-aversion, an antipathy towards the (conventionally attractive) human form, and an ever more homogenized culture facing an ever more heterogeneous public. If you were a designer trying to capture the zeitgeist, could you do better?