Lovely article! It induced an unexpected feeling of nostalgia for me personally as I previously worked at an large public art gallery. I was part of the marketing team and my role focused mostly on the digital side: web updates and digital signage throughout the space. The description of great artists in the article resonated with me; the best ones where those that truly did it for the art and were surprisingly humble.
That's not to say that all amateur artists are self-centered; I met plenty of up and coming artists that felt like wizened "old souls" without ego, and playful at heart. I think they were just great artists in the making!
Even though it wasn't the most high paying job, it was really fun being part of the visual art heartbeat in a city.
After most of my Threads sessions, my feed is essentially full of "Posts from this user have been muted" after silencing all the force-fed clickbait garbage tossed my way.
The interface is clean and light and honestly I like it. But I'd like it even more if I could have a feed showing only the users I follow.
This ruined Facebook years ago for me and continues to make social media unappealing.
I used to open Facebook every day, scroll down to see all my friends' new posts, and then close it once it said "all caught up!"
Of course, Facebook decided that the possibility of actually being "done" browsing Facebook for the day is a no-go, they want me engaged for 25 hours a day, so they will endlessly throw irrelevant crap at you.
Long-time illustrator here who has worked for various clients such as WIRED, Slack, etc etc. Here are my two rambly cents:
Firstly, I think this article is almost spot on. One of the major culprits behind this issue of "flat illustration" as I've seen it called is that there is usually a lack of originality being forced onto the illustrator from the hiring companies. Usually this is in the form of "we love what Company X is doing and would love to have something visually similar," and by visually similar, usually what they want is something that's pretty much the same but with a different colour palette. Boo!
But hey, if you're the illustrator here and they're not going to credit your name (which is generally the case with branding related work, such as this flat stuff) ... who gives a shit, right? Take the money and run and watch the world burn with flat illustration. /s
I said "almost spot on" earlier because one thing not mentioned in this article––and this has been my "theory" and those of my illustrator colleagues for years-–is the economic side of it all, and how it has affected illustrative output:
Firstly, know that illustration rates have been pretty stagnant since the 90s and deadlines are getting shorter and shorter due to the demands of real-time publishing. No more waiting for something to go to print, you just schedule a blog post.
Back in the dying era of print (mid-00s), even small illustration gigs could come with generous turnaround times of 3 or 4-ish weeks if you were lucky. Usually a week or two to figure out rough sketches and get approval from the client, and then a week or so to crank out the final art. Maybe you're painting or drawing this on physical media like paper, gouache, watercolour, etc, which comes with fantastic built-in features like texture and brushstrokes, where honestly flat is HARD to pull off.
But today it's more likely you get an email and the client wants sketches for Friday, and final art the following Wednesday. You simply don't have as much time to work on polishing up a nice sketch to turn into a painting; sometimes this stuff just needs straight-up time to massage into place. Instead, you can use the old bucket fill in Photoshop or flat fill in Illustrator, copy paste a few pieces from your own collection of past work perhaps, adjust a few colors and call it a day.
I admit when I first saw this stuff 10 or so years ago, I thought it was bold and graphic and honestly I wouldn't have had the courage to do something so simple; it's a nice shout out to the digital painterliness that is flat vector shapes. But when it becomes this common place ... well, it just looks boring.
Anyway, as much fun as it is to dump time and energy into a drawing, if the requested content is fucking lame and generic and the deadline is short, have fun getting nice original work out of it. Instead, maybe hire an illustrator on the long term and have them develop something truly unique that no one would want to be caught dead copying because it would just look like plagiarism.
It's not all doom and gloom though. Some of this flat stuff can be good! For example, many illustrations on the Apple App Store (on macOS, depending on the day) have a nice level of polish to them that push them past the generic flat style and can feel fresh and new, at least to me as an illustrator, while still satisfying some obvious corporate requests for something safe and predictable.
*edit*: spelings and puncs
*edit edit*: Corporate Memphis is such a dumb name for this. just call it Flat Style as all of the illustratorverse has been calling it for years.
I really hope Apple fixed the issue of wifi dropping out in iOS 14.5. It's been randomly dropping ever since iOS 13 (only device in the house that does), and I've been dinged by my provider in overage fees a few times because of it...
I had the same problem, it turned out that "Wi-Fi Assist" was enabled for some reason. After I disabled it it started working okay, at least I don't see "LTE" every time I pick the phone at home.
Take a PSD that has many layers. Look at its filesize (mine is ~70mb). Add one layer to the PSD, fill it with white, and make it the topmost layer. Save it as a new PSD and compare the filesizes.
Most* PSD files contain a "preview" copy of the fully-flattened document (which is compressed.) Flat white image compresses far better, so that portion of the file doesn't take as much space.
Depending on what your layers look like (how many, how much they cover, etc.) it's not too surprising that the preview image could take a substantial fraction of the total file size (sounds like ~20% in this case!)
* I believe this behavior can be toggled off with an option.
Interesting. I want to believe this is the case, but I feel like it is still a bug/quirk.
In Photoshop's preferences there is an option under File Handling to disable image previews, and toggling this seems to have no effect on what I described above. Strange!
Perhaps, but it's quite convenient for any software that wants to ingest PSD files without the (nigh-intractable) challenge of reimplementing the entirety of Photoshop's parser and rendering systems!
