Atlassian Design System vs Corporate Memphis
Atlassian Design System / コーポレート・メンフィス
Atlassian Design System comes from Platform Screen Languages and Corporate Memphis from Illustration Styles. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Atlassian Design System
A system that translates the complexity of Jira and Confluence into shared tokens, content rules, spacing, grids and components. Consistency builds trust while keeping large sets of issues, documents and states navigable.
Corporate Memphis
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Explains digital services as safe and friendly through simplified figures, geometry and soft color.
| Atlassian Design System | Corporate Memphis | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2012– | mid-2010s– |
| Family | Platform Screen Languages | Illustration Styles |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | White and pale gray layers with blue primary actions / Rounded cards and lozenge-shaped status labels / Clear divisions among sidebar, table and detail pane / Color, spacing, radius and elevation controlled by tokens | Exaggerated body ratios / Flat color / Geometric plants / White grounds |
| Best used for | Work-management products where people move repeatedly between lists and details · Keeping a trusted family resemblance across products without hiding their complexity | Explaining how a new service works in a short space on screen · Giving hiring and benefits pages one relaxed and consistent tone |
| Type | Fix the steps for headings, body and labels; keep status names short inside lozenges. | Geometric sans at light weight, headlines kept to one line |
| Composition | Keep navigation, list and detail roles stable; use token multiples for spacing. | Keep the white ground open and set figures diagonally toward the text |
| Material | Use white and pale gray as the base, blue for primary actions and one semantic meaning per status color. | Flat color without outlines, held to two or three muted hues |
| Caution | Too many cards and status labels give every component equal force and hide the work that matters next. | Reducing everything to shapes anyone could draw leaves images indistinguishable from competitors, flattens the people into symbols of diversity, and tells the viewer nothing about what the company does. |