If you’ve been online in the past five years, you’ve seen them: brightly colored, human-like characters with wobbly limbs and disproportionate torsos, smiling, jumping, clapping and watering their plants .
Facebook first developed the basic aesthetic principles of shape-based flat art into its internal style, known as Alegria (that’s Spanish for “joy,” an emotion rarely associated with Facebook), in 2017. The abstract characters, in their innocuous cheerfulness and bright purple or blue skin tones, are instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever spent time on facebook.
Since then, Alegria and its knockoffs have defined the digital aesthetic of the late 2010s, just as the all-white minimalism associated with neon signage and plants defined the look of commercial establishments. Slack and Google have rolled out copycats, as have banking apps, online media, and even sexual health startups. Vector-based flat art was suddenly everywhere, especially in startup and tech branding. His omnipresence seemed disturbing, his relentless optimism infantilizing.
Soon the backlash began: the gaze became derisively known as “globohomo” (global homogenization), “corporate Memphis” or, even more so, “corporate technology style”. He was both so recognizable and so hated that he became a starter pack memethe object of a very active subredditand the victim of innumerable parodies, in particular a imitating “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco Goya.
Professional illustrators point to a gradual return to texture and realistic brushstrokes on flat art, as well as 3D-like skeuomorphism, thanks to Zuckerberg’s metaverse. Even so, it’s safe to say that love it or hate it, the style is now an enduring trend. And it’s time to consider flat art with more nuance.
Some scholars and illustrators champion the style and its art historical legitimacy, whether they are adopters or practitioners. What appears at first sight as a barren sea of sameness, they say, has unexpected depth and variety.
“I think flat art has become a scapegoat for all of the systemic issues we face in our industry, from losing authorship to ever-faster deadlines, to the need to navigate being” genuine “while making money,” says Montreal illustrator and researcher Julien Posture, who has a background in anthropology. “I think it was reassuring to blame it all on one style, one type of client, as a way to dismiss the much more disturbing reality that these issues are spreading all over the creative industry.”
After years of being the punching bag of aesthetic-minded internet users, flat art deserves a more holistic understanding that goes beyond its association with technological dystopias disguised as technological utopias: it’s a style that has its own merits.
“A lot of the criticism is about the style itself, and people say how flatness is kind of dehumanizing or how exaggerated proportions are kind of dehumanizing,” says illustrator Michele Rosenthal. “People say it’s inherently a business style.”
Rosenthal calls herself a flat art apologist: she’s been a vector illustrator since 2007 and is part of a growing cohort of creative professionals who have done so online. purpose to defend this style.
“It’s just part of our design language; it’s ideas that have been in Western art for a very long time now,” she says.
In fact, form-based flat art has been around since the Stone Age and its cave paintings. It regained prominence with Modernism, when Western artists leaned into non-European artistic traditions to avoid realistic and figurative art. Consider the exaggerated proportions seen in the “The Ladies of Avignon,” or the flat surfaces of Matisse “Dance.”
Another illustrious precedent in flat art is the work of art-deco poster designer AM Cassandre, whose seemingly simple flat illustrations are, however, underpinned by mathematical calculations. Then came the mid-century aesthetic. Disney artist Mary Blair, most notable for the concept art of key scenes from “Alice in Wonderland” and “Sleeping Beauty”, created high-contrast color illustrations juxtaposed with surreal landscapes and oddly proportioned figures. And while the 1970s and 1980s gave way to more painterly styles of illustration, in the 1990s, when personal computers were outfitted with graphics programs with limited toolkits, people began experimenting with graphics. digital illustration.
“One thing the computer could do well was flat art. Or, more specifically, vector art,” says Rosenthal.
While Facebook was the first to popularize the use of flat art, it doesn’t own the style, and all imitators have meant a job boom for some designers.
“Somewhere around 2012, I started getting clients from the tech sphere who wanted artwork for their apps,” says Rosenthal. “Before that, honestly, I didn’t find many takers for my style of illustration. I started getting interest from all these tech startups who wanted to make their apps more engaging and fun.
Playfulness goes hand in hand with nostalgia, another component of shape-based vector art.
“A lot of illustrators working in this style grew up with children’s books made in this style and saw old animations made in this style,” Rosenthal explains. “And because he has that familiarity, he works well. Tech companies want things to feel familiar. They don’t want things to feel like it’s a scary new technological world.
And while the styles of Google and Facebook may, indeed, seem seamless, there are companies that are pushing the ways shape-based illustrations are used. In dating app illustrations Hingefor example, the characters harmoniously follow a curvilinear line of action, while the educational animation studio Kurzgesagt combines flat art with lighting and shadow effects, convincingly reproducing, for example, the glow of magma or celestial objects. The New Yorkr like flat art, with illustrations of Malika Favre and Olimpia Zagnoli on his covers.
Rosenthal points out that, in the field of illustration, individual style trumps anything that we might perceive as trends. “Most illustrators, we kind of have our own style that we like to work in,” she says. “So if someone hires us, they hire us for the style we already practice – they don’t tell us to work in someone else’s style. It’s a mistake that people think a lot of illustrations are in a similar style because customers ask for it.
It’s also important to note that, for professional illustrators, flat art can be an ideal medium, especially in the context of stagnant or shrinking budgets coupled with fast turnaround times.
“Vectors have the advantage of being efficient and scalable, which is really useful when the image can end up in another medium,” says Posture.
Rosenthal says some people have blamed the style itself for driving down artwork prices, but that’s not true. Illustration prices have been falling for decades. Creating artwork that’s a bit quicker to complete and doesn’t require a room full of art supplies in addition to a computer and expensive software, she says, can make work easier with those lower illustration prices.
“It keeps illustration viable as a career,” she says.