I used to think grids were boring.
Then I spent three months staring at Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow” hanging in a MoMA hallway, wondering why designers kept photographing it on their phones, and it finally clicked—this wasn’t just paint on canvas, this was a blueprint for how we’d organize information on glowing rectangles a century later. Neo Plasticism, that Dutch art movement from the 1920s that reduced everything to primary colors, black lines, and right angles, somehow predicted the visual language of every app interface you’ve ever swiped through. Mondrian and his De Stijl colleagues were obsessed with stripping away ornament, with finding what they called “universal beauty” through geometric reduction, and turns out that obsession maps almost perfectly onto the constraints of screen-based design—limited color palettes, rectangular containers, hierarchical layouts that guide your eye exactly where developers want it to go.
The thing is, color blocking wasn’t invented for aesthetics. It was a philosophical stance.
Theo van Doesburg, who co-founded De Stijl with Mondrian in 1917, wrote manifestos arguing that diagonal lines were chaotic, that curves represented nature’s randomness, that only horizontal and vertical relationships could express “the spiritual” in art. Sounds pretentious, I know, but when you think about how interfaces work—navigation bars horizontally anchored at the top, sidebars vertically locked to the left, content blocks stacked in predictable columns—you realize we’ve internalized those same rules. Material Design, the system Google rolled out in 2014, literally uses the term “blocks” to describe its layered card components, each one a flat rectangle with a primary color or white background, separated by subtle shadows that create depth without breaking the grid. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines do something similar, emphasizing “clarity” through generous white space and bold color fields that segment functionality. Wait—maybe that’s not coincidence.
When Mondrian’s Primary Palette Became Your App’s Brand Identity
Primary colors dominate because they’re cognitively efficient. Red for alerts, blue for trust, yellow for caution—these associations aren’t universal, but they’re widespread enough that designers default to Mondrian’s exact triad when they need instant recognition. I’ve seen startup pitch decks where founders literally point to “Broadway Boogie Woogie” and say “that’s our vibe,” which is both hilarious and revealing. The painting, finished in 1943 after Mondrian fled to New York, breaks his earlier rigidity with bursts of smaller blocks, a syncopated rhythm that designers now replicate in dashboard layouts where data cards pulse with different accent colors to indicate status. Anyway, the psychological research backs this up—studies from the late 1990s and early 2000s consistently showed that interfaces using restricted color schemes (three to five hues max) reduced cognitive load by roughly 23 percent compared to gradient-heavy designs, though I’d need to double-check those exact numbers.
The Grid System That Accidentally Solved Responsive Design Problems Decades Early
Here’s the thing: Neo Plasticism’s asymmetrical balance was always responsive, we just didn’t have a word for it yet. Mondrian never centered his compositions—he’d shove a thick black line off to one side, balance a huge red square against two tiny blue ones in the opposite corner, and somehow it worked because he understood visual weight distribution. CSS Grid and Flexbox, the layout engines that power modern web design, operate on identical principles. You define columns and rows, you assign proportional sizing (fr units in CSS, essentially Mondrian’s intuitive ratios formalized), you let content reflow based on viewport width. I guess it makes sense that the best interfaces feel “balanced” without being symmetrical, that empty space (negative space in art theory, whitespace in UX parlance) does as much work as the colored blocks themselves.
Designers call it “breathing room” now.
But van Doesburg called it “dynamic equilibrium” in 1930, and he meant the same thing—that tension between elements creates energy, that a composition (or interface) should feel stable but not static, organized but not rigid. Brutalist web design, that mid-2010s trend of bare-bones layouts with harsh blacks and primary color accents, was literally a Neo Plastic revival, though most practitioners probably didn’t realize they were quoting Gerrit Rietveld’s 1924 furniture designs. The Schröder House in Utrecht, which Rietveld built as a livable De Stijl manifesto, features sliding walls and rotating panels that reconfigure rooms—modular interface design before interfaces existed. I visited it once and kept thinking about responsive breakpoints, about how the architecture “adapts” to user needs the same way a well-coded website reflows from desktop to mobile. Honestly, the parallels are kind of eerie.
Why Flat Design Won and Skeuomorphism Had To Die For Mondrian To Win
Skeuomorphic design—those fake leather textures and glossy buttons that dominated early iOS—was the opposite of Neo Plastic thinking, and it had to go. Apple’s shift to flat design in iOS 7 (2013) wasn’t just aesthetic preference; it was a return to those 1920s principles of honesty in materials, of not pretending a glass screen is wood or metal. Jony Ive literally used the word “deference” in interviews, arguing that ornamentation deferred to content, that removing gradients and shadows let information breathe. Which is exactly what Mondrian meant when he eliminated representational imagery—the message becomes clearer when you strip away the noise. Microsoft’s Metro design language (later rebranded as Fluent) did this even earlier, in 2010, with its live tiles and bold typography, and it flopped initially because users found it too stark, too unfamiliar. Turns out you can be ahead of the curve and wrong at the same time, or maybe just early.
The backlash to extreme flatness came quick, though. By 2015, designers were reintroducing subtle shadows (Google called it “Material Design” to distinguish it from pure flatness), admitting that some depth cues help users understand what’s tappable versus static. Neo Plasticism never solved that problem because paintings don’t have buttons, but the core idea—clarity through reduction, hierarchy through color and proportion—remains the foundation every interface framework builds on, whether it’s Bootstrap’s grid system, Tailwind’s utility classes, or whatever design tokens your company’s drowning in spreadsheets trying to standardize.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Why This Style Persists Across Decades and Platforms
It’s cheap to implement. There, I said it.
Primary colors don’t require gradients, flat rectangles render faster than complex illustrations, grid-based layouts scale across devices without custom breakpoints for every screen size—Neo Plastic design principles reduce both cognitive and computational overhead, which means they survive because they’re economically efficient, not just visually elegant. A startup can spin up a “Mondrian-inspired” interface in a weekend using a CSS framework, no custom assets required. That’s why every SaaS dashboard looks vaguely similar, why “modern” design converges on the same blue-and-white minimalism—we’re all working from the same 1920s playbook because it’s the path of least resistance. And maybe that’s fine? I don’t know. Sometimes I miss the weird textured buttons and playful chaos of early-2000s web design, but I also appreciate being able to find the “submit” button without a scavenger hunt. The De Stijl artists thought they were designing for utopia, for a post-war world that needed order and clarity. Instead, they designed for an economy that needs to ship fast and iterate faster, where “universal beauty” just happens to align with “universal scalability.” Wait—maybe that’s the real genius, that their aesthetic preferences encoded practical constraints they couldn’t have predicted. Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit, and it’s all just rectangles we’ve agreed to call sophisticated.
