I used to think the bold flatness of modern graphic illustration—those blocky shapes, the unapologetic primary colors, the way figures seem carved rather than drawn—was just a digital-age aesthetic.
Turns out, that visual language has roots tangled deep in Mesoamerican history, specifically in the surviving Aztec codices that somehow escaped Spanish bonfires in the 1500s. These weren’t books in any sense we’d recognize—they were accordion-folded bark paper or deerskin, painted with mineral pigments that still burn bright after five centuries, depicting everything from tax records to creation myths. The figures are geometric, almost aggressively two-dimensional, with bodies rendered in profile while eyes stare straight ahead—a visual grammar that breaks perspective rules European art spent centuries perfecting. What’s wild is how contemporary illustrators keep returning to these same visual tricks: flat color fields, bold outlines, that strange mix of frontal and profile views that shouldn’t work but somehow does. I guess it makes sense that designers hungry for alternatives to Western realism would mine these codices, but the influence runs deeper than simple borrowing.
The Codex Borbonicus, probably created just before or right after Spanish contact, shows this aesthetic at its most refined. Deities and humans alike are built from interlocking shapes—trapezoids for torsos, perfect circles for joints. There’s no shading, no atmospheric perspective, no attempt to trick the eye into seeing depth.
When Geometry Becomes the Whole Point of Visual Storytelling
Here’s the thing—Aztec scribes weren’t rejecting realism because they couldn’t achieve it; they were working in a symbolic system where clarity mattered more than illusion. Every color carried meaning (red for east, blood, life; black for north, obsidian, the underworld), every gesture was codified. Modern illustrators like Rafael López and Jorge Gutiérrez have explicity cited codex aesthetics as foundational to their work, particularly that quality of making every element visually democratic—a human figure gets the same graphic weight as a speech scroll or a place glyph. You see this in contemporary editorial illustration too: the way a Bloomberg Businessweek cover might render a CEO as interlocking geometric shapes, or how Malika Favre’s work for The New Yorker uses that same ruthless flatness. It’s not about copying Aztec imagery directly; it’s about adopting that underlying philosophy where symbolism trumps naturalism.
Wait—maybe I’m overstating the direct lineage here.
Plenty of modern illustrators probably never cracked open a codex facsimile. But visual languages seep through culture in weird ways. The muralist movement in post-revolutionary Mexico, especially Diego Rivera’s work in the 1920s and ’30s, deliberately revived pre-Columbian aesthetics as political statement. Those murals influenced American designers, who influenced the Polish poster school, which influenced contemporary digital illustration—it’s a game of telephone across a century. What persists is that core idea: you can communicate complex narratives through bold, flat, geometric forms that refuse the illusion of three-dimensional space. The Codex Mendoza, created in the 1540s to explain Aztec culture to Spanish authorities, shows tributary towns as simple architectural glyphs—a temple, a name glyph, a number. It’s information design, basically, and it’s shockingly effective. Corporate infographics owe more to this tradition than most designers probably realize.
Why Flat Color and Symbolic Clarity Keep Winning Against Realism
I’ve seen this pattern repeat in design history: whenever visual culture gets too cluttered or too committed to photorealism, there’s a swing back toward symbolic simplicity.
The Aztec approach—where a single image could encode genealogy, mythology, economics, and cosmology simultaneously—offers a template for our current information-saturated moment. We’re drowning in data, and realistic renderings often obscure more than they reveal. The codex method, where every element is legible and deliberately placed, feels urgent again. Plus, there’s something emotionally direct about that style. Modern illustrators talk about how flat color and strong outlines convey immediacy, even urgency—the same effect you get from staring at a page of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, where gods and ritual objects crowd the frame with equal intensity, demanding attention. It’s definately not subtle. The Spanish friars who preserved some codices while burning hundreds of others understood they were looking at a complete visual language, one that could recieve and transmit knowledge as effectively as alphabetic text. Contemporary designers are still learning that lesson, still finding new ways to let geometry and symbol carry narrative weight. Honestly, I think we’re just scratching the surface.
