I used to think the Futurists were just loud Italians who liked speed and hated museums.
Turns out—and this took me way too long to realize, honestly—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his crew were essentially prototyping the visual language we scroll through every single day on our phones. When Marinetti published his 1909 manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro, he wasn’t just declaring war on passéism; he was sketching out something closer to what we now call “dynamic typography” or “kinetic design.” The Futurists obsessed over fragmentation, simultaneity, overlapping planes of motion—basically everything your Instagram feed does when it loads three video ads, a Reel, and your friend’s vacation photos all at once. They wanted art that moved at the speed of modern life, which in 1912 meant trains and telegraphs but in 2025 means doomscrolling at 3 a.m. Their paintings—Boccioni’s “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” Balla’s “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”—tried to capture motion itself, layering sequential moments into one compressed visual experience. Sound familiar? It’s basically what motion graphics designers do in After Effects, except the Futurists were working with oil paint and, I guess, a lot of caffeine.
Anyway, here’s where it gets weirder. The Futurists didn’t just predict how we’d consume images—they predicted the whole aesthetic of digital overload. Their typographic experiments look like early glitch art or vaporwave before anyone knew what a computer was.
Giacomo Balla’s 1914 piece “Abstract Speed + Sound” uses overlapping geometric forms and color gradients that could easily pass for a Spotify playlist cover or some startup’s landing page. Carlo Carrà’s “Patriotic Celebration” (1914) layers text at different angles, sizes, and orientations—exactly what every Instagram story template does now, except Carrà was doing it with letterpress blocks and had to physically arrange each word. The Futurist obsession with “words-in-freedom” (parole in libertà) meant breaking sentences apart, scattering them across the page, letting typography itself carry emotional weight. Which, wait—that’s literally what meme culture does. Impact font at the top, punchline at the bottom, visual chaos in the middle. The structure’s the same; we just swapped out Marinetti’s war metaphors for jokes about capitalism and dating apps.
I’ve seen design students recreate Futurist posters without even realizing they’re working in a century-old tradition.
The thing that really gets me, though—and maybe this is obvious, but it hit me hard when I was staring at Umberto Boccioni’s sketches in a Milan archive last year—is how much the Futurists valued velocity over clarity. They wanted you to feel overwhelmed, to experiance the sensation of too-much-at-once. Modern digital interfaces do this constantly, not always intentionally. Your Twitter feed isn’t designed to be calming; it’s designed to keep you stimulated, fragmented, moving. The Futurists would’ve loved TikTok. Seriously. Thirty-second bursts of overlapping sound, text, image, motion—Marinetti literally wrote in his 1913 manifesto about destroying syntax, using math symbols and musical notation mid-sentence, creating what he called “wireless imagination.” That’s basically what happens when you’re watching a video essay on YouTube and the creator has five different text layers, zooming B-roll, and a soundtrack that shifts every eight seconds. It’s overstimulating, sure, but it’s also effective in a way traditional narrative structures aren’t anymore.
Here’s the thing: the Futurists were also kind of terrible people—Marinetti supported Mussolini, celebrated war as “the world’s only hygiene,” and the movement’s politics were, to put it mildly, a disaster. But their visual ideas? Those escaped containment. You can hate their ideology and still recognize that they accidently built the blueprint for how digital culture processes information.
I guess what I’m saying is that every time you see a website with parallax scrolling, asymmetric layouts, and text that moves as you scroll—every time you watch a music video that layers three different timeframes on top of each other—you’re looking at Futurism’s ghost. We just don’t call it that anymore. We call it “modern design.” But Boccioni and Balla got there first, roughly a hundred years early, give or take, with nothing but paint and a manifesto and an unshakable belief that art should feel like getting hit by a train. Metaphorically. Mostly.
