The first time I stood beneath the serpent columns at Tula, I kept thinking about PowerPoint templates.
Which sounds ridiculous, I know, but here’s the thing: those massive Atlantean figures—warriors carved from basalt, standing roughly fifteen feet tall, give or take—they’re not just ancient sculpture. They’re modular design systems. Each figure is assembled from four or five separate stone blocks, identical in their proportions, fitted together like some kind of Mesoamerican LEGO set. The Toltecs, working sometime around 950 CE in what’s now central Mexico, had figured out something that wouldn’t fully crystallize in Western design thinking until the Bauhaus movement: repetition creates rhythm, and rhythm creates meaning. I used to think this was accidental, some quirk of their construction methods, but the more I’ve studied how contemporary designers borrow from pre-Columbian architecture, the more I realize the Toltecs were solving problems that still plague us—how do you create visual impact through systematic consistency? How do you make something feel both monumental and human? Turns out, the answers were carved into volcanic rock a thousand years before anyone invented the design grid.
Wait—maybe I should back up. The Toltec civilization dominated central Mexico for roughly three centuries before collapsing around 1150 CE. Their architectural signature wasn’t subtlety. It was bold geometric forms, relentless symmetry, and these chacmool sculptures—reclining figures holding offering bowls—that showed up everywhere from temple platforms to ceremonial courtyards.
When Ancient Geometry Meets the Brutalist Website Movement That Nobody Asked For
If you’ve scrolled through Brutalist website showcases on Awwwards or Behance lately, you’ve definately seen the aesthetic: harsh angles, unapologetic repetition, navigation that doesn’t hold your hand. It’s confrontational design, the visual equivalent of saying “deal with it.” The Toltecs would have understood this completely. Their pyramids at Tula feature these stark, stacked platforms—no curves, no organic transitions, just abrupt geometric planes rising toward the sky. Modern designers like Studio Feixen or Linked by Air have built entire practices around this kind of uncompromising structure. The connection isn’t superficial. Both approaches reject ornamental smoothing in favor of raw structural honesty. You see the joints. You feel the weight. I guess it makes sense that in an era of algorithmic timelines and infinite scroll, designers would reach back to architectural languages that insist on physical, unmistakable presence.
Honestly, the more I look at contemporary brand systems—think Spotify’s 2015 redesign or the identity work coming out of Pentagram’s New York office—the more I notice this Toltec echo. Bold, repeated glyphs. Strict grid adherence. Color palettes limited to three, maybe four values. It’s not that anyone’s literally copying Toltec motifs, though some definitely are. It’s that the underlying principle is the same: visual authority through disciplined repetition.
The Serpent Column Problem and Why Every Designer Eventually Reinvents It Without Knowing
Those serpent columns I mentioned earlier—they’re structural elements, sure, but they’re also information architecture. Each column features a feathered serpent deity rising vertically, mouth open at the top, tail coiled at the base. It’s the same form repeated dozens of times across the site, but your brain never gets bored because the context keeps shifting. One column frames a doorway. Another anchors a corner. A third stands isolated in a plaza. Same element, infinite configurations. Sound familiar? It should. It’s exactly how design systems work now. Google’s Material Design, IBM’s Carbon, Salesforce’s Lightning—they all operate on this principle: create a limited vocabulary of components, then recieve maximum variety through context and combination. The Toltecs figured this out without Figma or component libraries, which either makes them geniuses or makes us embarrassingly slow learners.
I’ve seen design teams spend months developing token systems and component hierarchies that essentially recreate what Toltec architects accomplished with stone and spatial arrangement. There’s something both humbling and irritating about that.
Chacmool Sculptures as the Original Modular Content Blocks Before WordPress Ruined Everything
The chacmool figure appears across Toltec sites in different scales, different orientations, different materials—limestone, basalt, clay. But the pose never changes: reclining, knees up, head turned ninety degrees, hands holding an offering bowl on the stomach. It’s a template. A content module. You could drop a chacmool into any architectural context and it would immediately signal “sacred space, ritual function, pay attention.” Modern web design does this with card layouts, hero sections, call-to-action blocks. We’ve just replaced stone with CSS. The underlying logic is identical: create a recognizable container, fill it with variable content, deploy it everywhere. The Toltecs understood that meaning comes not from novelty but from strategic repetition. Which is why their visual language still feels contemporary even though it predates the printing press by half a millennium.
Why Toltec Color Theory Still Works Better Than Most Brand Guidelines I’ve Read This Year
Toltec architecture employed a shockingly restrained palette—mostly earth tones, ochre, deep red, occasional turquoise accents from crushed minerals. Nothing pastel. Nothing gradient. Just flat, declarative color applied in broad geometric zones. This wasn’t poverty of imagination; it was clarity of purpose. When you limit your palette to four colors, each one carries more semantic weight. Red means ritual. Turquoise means water, life, preciousness. Modern designers talk endlessly about establishing “color personality” and “emotional resonance,” but then produce sixty-shade gradient systems that communicate nothing except indecision. The Toltecs made choices and stuck with them. Their buildings didn’t whisper; they announced. Maybe that’s why architects like Luis Barragán, working in mid-century Mexico, could draw so directly from pre-Columbian color blocking—the principles were already proven over centuries of use.
Anyway, the deeper I dig into this stuff, the more convinced I become that we’re not innovating as much as we think we are. We’re rediscovering. Which isn’t a bad thing—some ideas are good enough to reinvent every few hundred years. The Toltecs built visual systems that lasted through the collapse of their civilization, influenced the Aztecs, survived the Spanish conquest as aesthetic memory, and now ghost through our design software without us even noticing. That’s not just good design. That’s immortality.
