A Design Revisited: Memphis Design
What is Memphis design? Born in the 1980s and reaching its peak in the 1990s, the Memphis Group was a designer collective based in Milan, Italy, founded in 1980 by architect Ettore Sottsass. Inspired by the Art Deco, Bauhaus, and Pop Art movements, it crea...
What Is Memphis Design?
Born in the 1980s and reaching its peak in the 1990s, the Memphis Group was a designer collective based in Milan, Italy, founded in 1980 by architect Ettore Sottsass. Inspired by the Art Deco, Bauhaus, and Pop Art movements, they produced textiles, ceramics, glass, and metal sculptures from 1981 to 1988, as well as influential postmodern furniture.
As a design group formed to reject artificial, standardized expressions in design, they used bold colors and playful patterns, presenting distinctive work filled with unconventional structures, hard-to-define forms and uses, and a unique sense of wit and humor. In doing so, they played a major role as pioneers of free-spirited design.
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Memphis Design in the Modern Era
Fashion trends always come back around. This Memphis design that caused a huge sensation in the 1980s and 1990s has once again started to emerge as a trend today, two decades later. Moreover, modern Memphis design has evolved graphically to maximize “freshness” while retaining “modernity,” and has been applied across various fields of industrial design. Beyond fashion design, it is also widely used in posters and package design. Package design in the Memphis style is simpler than you might think. Give it a try!
What common traits stand out in the examples above? First, they feature flat or vectorized styles emphasized through bright, saturated colors, with little to no use of actual photographs. Instead, they use geometric shapes, elevating them into artistic elements and highlighting their graphic qualities. They also used many types of lines to emphasize design cues, and these features helped attract attention from afar.
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Because of these attention-grabbing, interest-driving qualities, Memphis design has risen in the field of package design, where aesthetics play a major role alongside functionality. It breaks away from conventional packaging design frameworks, uses distinctive patterns, brings freshness to consumers, and has established itself as a 2020s trend.
Memphis Design in Package Design
Source: Mimigram package / Source: Mimigram package / Source: Mimigram package
Inspired by the famous Memphis craze of the 1980s, this packaging was designed with a modern sensibility, featuring pastel tones and rounded typography, and filled with colorful, line-based patterns.
Source: Sandra M / Source: Sandra M / Source: Sandra M
The package above uses the elements of dot, line, and plane, along with vivid primary colors, to create an eye-catching design. In this package, not only graphic elements but also a photographic image at the top create harmony with the overall graphics.
Designing Memphis Style Yourself
Even if you are not a design major, you can easily create package designs. Packative provides a variety of shapes and graphic resources so that users can directly design custom packaging according to their own personality and produce it based on their preferences. Add the shapes you want to easily create a Memphis pattern and freely set the colors to make your own box full of personality! Create your own!
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In addition, the instant quotation system shows the costs required for production, so there is little delay from design to manufacturing. With multiple partner manufacturers across Korea, Packative can also respond immediately when urgent changes or contact are needed.
Visit the Packative website and create your own Memphis package design.