De Stijl

In the Netherlands, Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, and Gerrit Rietveld reduced design to its fundamentals: straight lines, right angles, and a strict palette of primary colors with black, white, and gray.

What looks like severe limitation was actually a search for universal order. De Stijl's rigorous reduction foreshadowed the grid-based, impersonal clarity that modern graphic design would later make its own.