Avoiding 'that' corporate art style

 dubbed 'corporate memphis' (after the memphis group) or 'big tech art style'.

From wired.com:

The illustration style is flat, geometric, figurative, and usually made up of solid colours. Nondescript figures are plastered across train stations and bus stops, from fintech company MoneyFarm, to Trainline, to the Viagra delivery service GetEddie. Even Transport for London’s own branding, with a special place in the history of Modernist graphic design, has started to replicate the style.

It’s an aesthetic that’s often referred to as ‘Corporate Memphis’, and it’s become the definitive style for big tech and small startups, relentlessly imitated and increasingly parodied. It involves the use of simple, well-bounded scenes of flat cartoon figures in action, often with a slight distortion in proportions (the most common of which being long, bendy arms) to signal that a company is fun and creative. Corporate Memphis is inoffensive and easy to pull off, and while its roots remain in tech marketing and user interface design, the trend has started to consume the visual world at large. It’s also drawing intense criticisms from those within the design world.

“It really boils my piss to be honest,” says Jack Hurley, a Leeds-based illustrator who says his main output is “daft seaside posters.” Hurley was familiar with the style from Facebook’s login page, but had started to see the illustrations, with their sensible, slightly strange characters, while walking around his neighbourhood as well. “I live in a student area and there are some real scumbag letting agents,” he says. “Suddenly they've got all this marketing with the bendy-arm-people.”

examples

One reason corporations have embraced this art style is it's inoffensive diversity - people of ambiguous genders and ethnicities are displayed without actually showcasing diverse gender or ethnic identities.

In designing my character for the paper doll, I want to create a design which represents as many people as possible in order to engage a wide audience... however, I want to avoid the forced diversity and soullessness of the corporate designs. This is something I will keep in mind when designing.