Noooo.... that 90's style annoyed me to no end as it was just as cookie-cutter copy as the current crop of vector art. For some reason there was one thing which

Noooo.... that 90's style annoyed me to no end as it was just as cookie-cutter copy as the current crop of vector art. For some reason there was one thing which made is especially annoying: the fact that nearly every person in those illustration was wearing a neck tie, often flying out at odd angles, often garishly coloured. Oversized besuited- and -tied figurines flying over hills and dales, I can still see them... The original illustrator who launched the style and all the others who copied it probably thought it made the figures look like 'professionals' but for me it just made them look like the superfluous managers who, like veritable parasites, had hooked themselves into the system and started extracting nourishment. Maybe the fact that I worked at a big telco which had created a separate business unit for that new-fangled internet thing had something to do with it? We were placed in a different building and had as little contact as possible with the mothership to make sure its stifling culture would not hinder us in making a place for ourselves on the 'net. When it became clear that the 'net was where it was at those manager-types started flooding in - and the early developer types started flooding out, me amongst them.