Originally published at: The endless wave of corporate art | Boing Boing
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Next do a video on why people talk like this in YouTube videos. Sounds like a robots reading an essay
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He’s right on. The style he’s talking about is the Muzak of graphic art. Bland, boring, inoffensive. Muzak is designed to lull you into a dull trance where long gaps of silence might otherwise make you uncomfortable. This is the art-equivalent, unobtrusive blobs that don’t have any notable content in themselves but are used to fill empty space that might otherwise look visually uncomfortable.
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Speaking as a lapsed graphic designer and illustrator, this video is spot-on. I like how he not only takes on this bland trend in corporate group-think art, but points out how all flat art isn’t bad; that it can be complex and beautiful, and provides compelling examples. Well done.
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Not mentioned here, but the push for Alegria and Humaaaans style art was in part because this was a methodology of creating human representation in tech spaces which fit inside the pressure cooker of software production. By rendering more or less friendly human figures quickly, designers were able to inject human centered themes into internal and external communications. It’s not accidental that these illustrations tend to be less biased in their representations of race, gender and disability than the stock photography services they replaced.
This is… good?
The key here is that ease of use allowed for more art. In the case of open source Humaaans library, a set of configurable widgets (you can swap a track suit for a lab coat with a dropdown style override) mean that I can illustrate something like a user journey for a piece of medical tech in unavoidably human terms, rather than the visual language of a flow chart or system diagram.
On balance, I’ll take repetitive human forms over none at all.
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I suspect that this is a matter of taste; but I think you’ve put your finger on a major part of why I loathe these things so much; along with the gradual replacement of terse, functional, language with chirpy ‘friendly’ attempts at dialog in things like error messages and IVR hell-loops. (and don’t get me started on the advertisements; I assume that telling me that Windows 11 “brings you closer to what you love”, is supposed to be a ‘human centered theme in external communications’; but trying to impute that sort of affective importance to an operating system makes me throw up in my mouth a little.)
Aside from the inefficiency; there’s something insulting and unsettling in equal measure in having an inhuman system or interface try to tweak my social instincts with clip-art rather than just shutting up and getting to business.
So long as the central innovation is ‘can churn out art faster to fit existing development practices’; I’m not sure how this veneer of human engagement can ever be anything but gallingly inauthentic and more or less transparently manipulative.
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I’d pay good money to see every single one of the GrubHub characters being killed in outrageously violent and hilarious ways.
Good.
Money.
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Yeah!
Where is the composition?
Great clarification of blandly friendly images that I too have come to find annoying.
I think that annoyance is abig reason I like the art of someone like Joan Cornella. For me, it satisfyingly skewers that bland, fake, profit-seeking friendliness.
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I would like to go to any show you curate!!
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You should get the guy who did that recent butt rock video to post a counterpoint about how millions of people enjoy this type of art, and do you realize how much skill it takes to make bland, inoffensive dogshit…?
Honestly, this didn’t sound like the typical YouTube voice to me but more of a This American Life contributor style of verbal storytelling.
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Small heads, big bodies, unrealistic skin tones…
I LOVE IT! MWHAHA!
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Featuring graduates of the Read As If You’re Casually Talking Course!
In terms of how to sound while telling a story, TAL definitely has its own house style. I used to wonder (back when I listened to it sometimes) if they coach their presenters in Ira Glass* Narration Style.
*BTW, he’s Phillip Glass’s brother!
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It doesn’t surprise me to see this design all over the place. Mainly because corporations have been trying hard to mimic the language of inclusion without actually implementing it. I mention this because one part of the Allegria style segment mentions using non-human skin tones to universalize the human experience which in itself is just another way to milk those inclusion bucks just like how corporations glommed onto the BLM protests of 2020 with various tweets, ads, and even radio spots.
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