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Sorry for the tangent, but I'm sad to see even Apple is now pumping out terrible Alegria corporate art. In 10 years people are going to look back on all this t
by nostromo 5y ago
Sorry for the tangent, but I'm sad to see even Apple is now pumping out terrible Alegria corporate art.
In 10 years people are going to look back on all this terrible art and wonder what the hell every tech company was thinking.
There's even a subreddit dedicated to hating the Alegria trend: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckalegriaart/top/?t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckalegriaart/top/?t=all
- thrdbndndn 5y agoI can't say I like or hate it (yet), but why do all the tech companies start using them simultaneously?
- rglover 5y agoBecause independent thought is on life support. I'll be downvoted for that but most people are terrified of thinking for themselves. This is "safe" art.
- gen220 5y agoIt's a design trend, and the digital design space is relatively small and strongly-connected. Many companies use the same set of design shops, or employ designers who look up to or learned from those shops. It's analogous to how engineers across the english-speaking world simultaneously began using Docker or Hadoop or whatever. "Network effects".
- NelsonMinar 5y agohttps://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
- nostromo 5y agoIt started with Facebook in 2017: https://buck.co/work/facebook-alegria https://buck.co/work/facebook-alegria It's popular because 1) it's cheap and easy to produce since it doesn't take much talent 2) it's easily vectorized and resizable 3) its color pallet and disproportionate human forms are supposed to make it feel universal. Google copied Facebook, then a bunch of companies copied Google. And now finally Apple is onboard too. It's not a good look for Apple, which usually tries to create design trends, not follow them.
- StevePerkins 5y ago> its color pallet and disproportionate human forms makes it feel universal So we went from having Homer Simpson universal-color emojis, to a pallet of specific-color emojis, to be more inclusive. And then switched from stock photos of diverse people, to Homer Simpson cartoons, to be more universal. We're just making this all up from year to year, aren't we?
- cpmsmith 5y agoNot exactly – the "Homer Simpson" yellow emoji came after the initial (Apple) emoji font, which just had all the humans looking white, with no other options.
- userbinator 5y agoLong before non-Japanese started calling them "emoji", we had "smilies" and they were yellow.
- ectopod 5y agoYes. PhpBB and my Nokia feature phone have had yellow smilies since before iPhones were a thing.
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoThis is accurate. https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/smiley-face-history-thumbnail.jpg https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/smiley...
- nostromo 5y agoThis is false. The first emojis were Japanese in origin and were the first to use yellow faces. Apple copied the existing style from the Japanese illustrations.
- tomjakubowski 5y agoThis is untrue. Not that any of them look like Simpsons characters, but the only emoji option on iOS for like five years was the yellow-shaded cartoon face. It's still the default skin tone in most emoji sets. https://emojipedia.org/emoji-1.0/ https://emojipedia.org/emoji-1.0/
- seoulmetro 5y agoScared of being left out of a trend.
- TheHypnotist 5y agoWhat a bizarre gripe
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoit really is a horrible illustration style that is everywhere
- oliv__ 5y agoOh thanks for sharing that link, I thought most people actually liked that kind of illustration. I personally can't stand it and I had no idea it had a name
- novok 5y agoI don't mind the illustration style, but it's annoying about how overplayed it is among tech companies. If I was a founder I would ask my designers to not have the exact same art style as all the other companies explicitly, so people can tell the difference between our brands beyond color schemes and the size of our sans serif helvetica derivative word logos.
- rglover 5y agoTyranny of the bubble people.
- missedthecue 5y agoThey're great because you can make them genderless, raceless, and their body shapes are completely ambiguous, being neither overweight nor fit. My mother worked as a photo-editor for a textbook publishing company many years ago and it was ridiculous how many meetings went into making sure they balanced the distribution of people that appeared in the books.
- userbinator 5y agoneither overweight nor fit Unfortunately, they all seem to have elephantiasis instead.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoWhen you make something for everyone, it's reduced and diluted to the barest parts. Completely soulless i.e. perfect for a faceless tech giant!
- threeseed 5y agoHow is Apple faceless ? Everyone knows who the CEO and key executives are since they are visible at every product release.
- seoulmetro 5y agoThese companies are faceless because all your interactions with them do not go through humans and are usually devoid of any real, personal human interactions. It's not a literal take on the word faceless, there are faces, they're just not real. The real ones don't face you.
- threeseed 5y agoFor most people every interaction with Apple goes through a human. Buy a Mac, get it repaired, training etc. All in-store with an Apple employee.
- 5y ago
- zucked 5y agoTHANK YOU for helping me put a name to this. I started seeing it around the 2018 time frame EVERYWHERE. Gusto, Google, etc - you name it, it seemed like every mid-large tech company adopted it overnight. I felt like a crazy person trying to get people to notice!
- cpeterso 5y agoIt's also called Corporate Memphis, a reference to the Memphis Group, an Italian architecture group from the 1980s known for its designs often thought to be garish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
- robocat 5y agoAn article on the history of Algeria: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
- alexfringes 5y agoWhen this first started popping up, it reminded me heavily of Adobe Acrobat's product packaging and launch screen from the 90s / 00s: http://splashscreens.sourceforge.net/acrobat.php http://splashscreens.sourceforge.net/acrobat.php I had viscerally negative reactions to those as a child. Nothing ever foreshadowed "this is not going to be fun" quite like those shirts & ties. Nor was it clear why one would need to juggle the world to open a text document. (Maybe it was all just a premonition about the malware that is CC.)
- david2ndaccount 5y agoThe globe is a symbol of the world wide web.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoI’m continually impressed by the internet’s ability to come up with ways to be negative about things.
- nomel 5y ago> In 10 years people are going to look back on all this terrible art and wonder what the hell every tech company was thinking. This is true for all things, which is why art and styles constantly change, and constantly repeat. Whatever they picked, that you would have been happy with, would have meet the same fate, and a younger you would have the same perspective of it as you do now.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoMy kids (<10yo) just saw a commercial for GoogleFi with these characters and were just laughing at the nonsense of these non-human forms doing human things. They laughed so hard you had no idea what Fi was. Can’t tell if that’s a good or bad response to the art style…
- charles_f 5y agoHere is another tangent. What the hell is with Reddit's popup on mobile to get you to install their app?! That thing is plain destructive, and you used to be able to dismiss it but not it even redirects you to /r/popular. So I guess your only option to read reddit on mobile is the app despite having a perfectly functional website
- tylervigen 5y agoNot point of your post, but when I click that link on my phone Reddit won’t let me read it without downloading the app. The two options are download the app or go back to popular. It’s crazy to me that Reddit would be willing to go to that extreme to get people to download their app.