Remember Norman Rockwell? That icon of Americana?

In his day, Norman Rockwell was criticized for his saccharine sentimentality.

It’s easy to forget, but there was a time when corporate America eagerly embraced artists and illustrators. Rockwell painted ads for Coca-Cola. Andy Warhol got his start at Glamour magazine. Edward Hopper did work for Martin Advertising Company. Maxfield Parrish made pieces for General Electric. The list goes on.

Andy Warhol’s first corporate commission for Glamour Magazine.

This was, admittedly, a time when brands weren’t just corporations, when they conceived of themselves as distinctly American. Selling a product also meant selling an idealized vision of America itself. That was good for business. As a fictionalized, arrogant Conrad Hilton says in Mad Men: “It’s my job to bring America to the world, whether they like it or not.”

But that era of national mythmaking (problematic and exclusionary as it was) had an expiration date. As America’s cultural hegemony began to wane and its corporations scaled globally, their visual identities evolved. Suddenly, it wasn’t about selling America anymore. It was about selling universality, something legible in Seoul, Stockholm, and São Paulo.

Now, American brands, especially tech brands, want to appear borderless, frictionless, and placeless. To do that, they’ve increasingly turned to illustration, but not illustration in the traditional sense.

Over the past ten years, we’ve seen an explosion of a new kind of affable, antiseptic illustration. At first glance, it makes sense: it’s approachable, “inclusive,” and avoids the literalness or aspirational pressure of photography. Walk into any startup office or new café chain and you’ll likely see illustrations that looks something like this:

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But doesn’t it feel a little... generic?

You’ve heard us talk about blanding in our previous post. But there’s a related concept thats slightly more insidious because it masquerades as more human.

It’s called Corporate Memphis.

The term refers to a specific kind of flat, colorful, saccharine illustration style used by corporate brands over the last twenty years. Its name nods to the Memphis Group, the radical 1980s Italian design collective led by Ettore Sottsass and known for their expressive, chaotic, and anti-functional aesthetics.

But Corporate Memphis is everything Sottsass’ coterie wasn’t: safe and sterile, modular and mute.

The term was originally coined by curator Mike Merrill in 2018, just after Facebook/Meta launched Alegria, a design system created by Studio Buck that introduced stylized, bendy-limbed figures meant to humanize their digital experience. Alegria, which means “joy” in Spanish, soon provided a blueprint for hundreds of brands. Once people caught on to the demand for flat, friendly, frictionless design, we did what we do best: copy and paste.

In many ways, I can’t blame either of the parties responsible.

On the one hand, illustrators were being asked to draw the same thing over and over. Eventually someone thought, “Why not just make it open source?”

On the corporate side, the benefits were obvious: these illustrations integrated seamlessly across screen sizes and platforms. They scaled. They flexed. They were fast, cheap, and didn’t require photographers, models, or even illustrators. Just Figma.

Soon the illustration community responded with a wave of plug-and-play kits: Humaaans & Open Peeps by Pablo Stanley; IRA Design by Creative Tim; Storyset by Freepik; unDraw and LottieFiles.

Pandora’s box was open and technology firms (Facebook, Airbnb, Meta, Slack, Asana, Intercom, Stripe, and Google) dove in headfirst, looking for:

Design at scale: One style, infinite assets
Diversity without specificity: No one left out, no one seen
Human touch for inhuman systems: SaaS as a smile
Modular, not manual: Just drag, drop, deploy
Illustration sans illustrators: Templates over craft

What’s missing, of course, is soul: a brushstroke that could only belong to one hand. In flattening aesthetics for maximum reach, we’ve traded away expressive individuality, the very thing that makes illustration feel human.

This is reflective of a concerning cultural shift: a move away from specificity, from story. With the threat of AI looming over our collective shoulder, the question becomes more urgent: what survives when style is stripped of voice?

To find a living counter-example, we’re again looking east: to manga, a flat style where emotion isn’t flattened, but amplified.

Despite often being drawn quickly, often in black and white, with simple linework, manga showcases astonishing stylistic range. One glance at a page, and you might instantly know the hand behind it: Osamu Tezuka, Junji Ito, Katsuhiro Otomo, Naoki Urasawa, Seiichi Hayashi, Eguchi Hisashi, Hayao Miyazaki. Each carries a visual signature because there’s a person behind the line.

To understand manga’s expressive power, you have to understand its roots, specifically in Kabuki theater, one of Japan’s two major classical forms, alongside Noh.

Noh is slow, spare, and metaphysical; beloved by the elite for its ambiguity and restraint. Kabuki is its populist, unruly sibling: bold, bawdy, vibrant. Exaggerated gestures, dramatic makeup, and moral clarity make it entertaining and emotionally legible, even to the untrained eye.

Just as Kabuki actors use mie—stylized, frozen poses held at emotional peaks—manga uses frozen panels, speed lines, and hyper-expressive faces to heighten impact. This isn’t affected; it is performance in two dimensions.

Sweat drops. Nosebleeds. Background bursts. These visual conventions aren't tropes, they're cues: emotional shortcuts.

Much like a sword flourish or a foot stomp on the Kabuki stage, they announce a mood before the reader even processes the text. That’s why manga can shift from slapstick to tragedy in a page and never lose the audience. It’s designed to be felt, like a punch in the stomach, not read.

Where Noh celebrates understatement, Kabuki (and manga) amplify emotion. And yet, within the spectacle lies something more sacred: stories of loss, duty, transformation.

Having seen both Noh and Kabuki performed in Japan, I view them not as opposites but complements. One requires deep cultural knowledge; the other is instinctually accessible. That’s what makes manga so valuable for designers and brand builders: it’s art that communicates quickly, powerfully, and memorably.

I experienced my own gut-punch with manga while in Tokyo, sifting through the bookshelves in Jimbocho, the city’s unofficial ghost town for old, dusty, and forgotten manuscripts. There, I came across a book of illustrations that instantly spoke to me, despite being in Japanese, a language I only half understand. But in front of the cashier, hesitated, thinking of the towering piles of unread books awaiting me back home in the US. (The Japanese conveniently have a word for this: tsundoku.) In the end, I didn't buy it. Admittedly, I don't know whether or not the self-restraint should be applauded, especially since I still have a copy sitting in my eBay cart.

The book was Japanese Woman by Seiichi Hayashi.

Seiichi Hayashi is one of the rare figures who bridged avant-garde manga with commercial art. His work reshaped visual culture in Japan, from manga pages to candy wrappers.

Trained in the International Typographic Style (a Swiss-developed, Bauhaus-influenced design system), Hayashi began his career at Toei Animation before launching Red Colored Elegy, his breakout manga. He would go on to design record covers for bands like Lamp and Happy End, create collectible “drawing cards” for McDonald’s Japan, and build the graphic identity for the Japanese candy company Lotte.

His illustration style draws inspiration from Pop Art, French New Wave cinema, and Bauhaus minimalism, all while retaining the lyricism of traditional Japanese linework and ukiyo-e framing. Hayao Miyazaki credits him as a dominant influence. I can see why.

Illustration from Japanese Woman by Seichii Hayashi

Hayashi documents a culture in flux. His muted colors and emotionally subdued tone explore the tension between imported ideals and a more intimately felt experience. His art doesn’t explicitly reject modernity; instead, he uses a modernist vernacular question its costs. His work is simple, domestic and urban, dripping in a particular form of Japanese melancholy, suffused with a kind of nostalgia that doesn’t name its source.

For many, it evokes a Japan suspended between postwar Westernization and fading tradition. For me, it evokes the familiar ache of perpetual present: the experience of losing things faster than we can even appreciate them. In other words, his work calls attention to what’s already already been lost, what can never be regained.

In more ways than one, I’ve come to see Hayashi as Japan’s rejoinder to Rockwell: an illustrator of everyday life, unafraid to confront his country’s contradictions. To wit, most of us no longer remember Rockwell for his idealized scenes of small-town life. Instead, we most likely recall The Problem We All Live With, his 1964 painting of six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to her desegregated school by U.S. Marshals, which he originally painted for Look magazine. Since 2011, it has hung in the West Wing of the White House, a living testament to our selective memory, our willful amnesia. A reminder that nostalgia often risks glossing over what we’d rather not remember.

The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell

But it’s also a more meaningful reminder of what illustrations, in the hands of progressive corporations, can do when they’re not just expected to sell, but to speak.

What America Forgot, Japan Remembers (Part IV): Japanese Manga vs. Corporate Memphis

The Well Has Run Dry: A Eulogy for McGlinchey’s & What’s Vanishing Across America

What America Forgot, Japan Remembers (Part III): “Shikake” or The Art of Shaping Behavior Through UX Design