The Corporate Art Style and How to Prompt It
FLORA
The corporate art style is the flat, friendly illustration look tech companies used to fill apps and web pages in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Its cartoon-like figures have long elastic arms and small heads. Their skin is often purple or blue, and fine detail is almost absent. They smile, high-five and water plants. The modern version began as Alegria, which Facebook commissioned in 2017, so it also goes by the Facebook art style. Google and Slack have both used it. Every image below came from FLORA's AI image generator with one scene at its center, two coworkers with purple and blue skin high-fiving beside a giant potted plant.
Corporate art style examples made in FLORA
Each image drops that high five into a new format, a website banner in one and an enamel pin in another, to show how far the style travels. Captions carry the complete prompts.
How to prompt for corporate art style
Most image models recognize the Corporate Memphis art style by name, yet the label alone tends to drift toward generic flat vector. Proportion is what makes it read correctly, so describe the people first, with long elastic arms, a small head and skin in a color no person has. Then give the pair something to do. The stock activities are high-fiving, painting and running. Keep color to four or five solid fills on white or a pale tint and leave out outlines and texture. A web banner is the default medium, and flat elements give lighting so little to do that you can usually skip it.
Good corporate style art depends on restraint, and larger figures in particular should carry very few small details. A face can shrink to one smile. For the isometric variant, say isometric and name the furniture so the figures sit on a tilted grid.
Three prompts to copy
- Hero banner. Corporate art style hero illustration of two coworkers with purple and blue skin high-fiving beside a giant potted plant, flat vector figures with exaggerated long bendy arms, tiny heads, oversized legs and feet, minimal faces, solid bright colors, no outlines, white background, no text
- Isometric. Isometric illustration of two coworkers with purple and blue skin high-fiving beside a giant potted plant in an open office, corporate memphis style, elongated arms, flat unshaded pastel desks and laptops, no text
- Soft 3D. Soft 3D clay render of two coworkers with purple and blue skin high-fiving beside a giant potted plant, corporate art style proportions with long arms and small heads, matte finish, pastel studio backdrop, gentle shadows, no text
What tends to go wrong
The most common miss is a figure that slides into ordinary stock vector, with a detailed face, natural skin and shaded clothes. Restate flat solid color and a non-realistic skin tone in every prompt to stop it. Proportions creep back toward normal over a session too, so push the wording harder if the arms stop reaching past the hips. Any mention of a website or app invites fake buttons and placeholder copy, so these prompts describe a banner illustration and end with no text.
Where corporate art style works
Onboarding screens, empty states and help-center articles still suit it, and it stays a practical business art style there because a flat figure explains a task without looking staged. Pair the hero art with icons from the icon maker, which turns a style reference and a description into a matching set.
Rebrands need the colors locked first. Palette Pull reads HEX values out of a finished image. AI mockups then puts the artwork on photoreal products like the tote and pin above.
By 2023 oversaturation had worn the style down, and it had started showing up as parody. For a joke slide, push the proportions until they turn absurd, with arms past the knees and the same grin on every face, and you have the corporate art style meme.
Related styles
For the hand-drawn side of flat figures, see cartoon art styles, mid-century flat in particular. Pop art style drew on popular and commercial culture back in the 1950s and 1960s. Cute art styles swap long arms for big heads, and jelly art style is the glossy, translucent opposite of all this flatness.
FAQs
What is the corporate art style called?
Corporate Memphis is the corporate art style name you'll see most often. Mike Merrill coined it from the title of an Are.na board that collected early examples. The look has also gone by corporate tech style.
Who invented alegria art?
The agency Buck. Facebook approached Buck in 2017, and the studio's illustrators finished Alegria about a year later. Its roots run back to 2013, when Apple dropped skeuomorphism for flat design, and the stretched proportions have precedents in Modernist painting such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Matisse's The Dance (1910).
Why is it called Memphis Design?
The name points to the Memphis Group, a now-defunct Italian design group of the 1980s known for bright colors, childish patterns and geometric shapes. The tech version shares the bright color and simple geometry, and the comparison stuck.
Why do people still use Memphis design today?
Mostly cost. Startups likely use it because it costs less than stock imagery, and smaller companies use it to look like established tech firms. It still turns up in places like the 2020 video game Going Under, and critics likened Canada's 2023 passport redesign to it. By 2022, though, Fast Company reported that companies had returned to 3D-like skeuomorphism.
