Design movements are deliberate, often collective, approaches to style, materials, function, and context in design that emerge when designers respond to broader social, technological, or economic forces.
For UX (user experience) designers, in addition to a product’s interface and functionality, the visual, physical, and behavioral language the user perceives shape its UX. By understanding how design movements structured decisions about form, function, materials, and user context, you can borrow the underlying principles to create more coherent, meaningful, and future-aware experiences.
In this video, watch how UX design grew from early aesthetic principles through the rise of personal computing to become a multidisciplinary practice focused on creating intuitive, meaningful experiences across products and services.
Why mention the past when you might feel you’re supposed to be looking forward to innovative designs? The past is past, after all, and however great the movements that once shaped design were, aren’t their products now largely the stuff of museums, history books, and retro-oriented living rooms and dens? However, consider what powerful design movements from other times achieved, including the Arts and Crafts movement, De Stijl, and Bauhaus. Each movement defined its own visual and material language, its values around how people use things, and the way design should respond to users, tools, and environments.
Sure, some movements may seem to have been more about furniture and buildings than anything “transferable” to, say, screens showing digital products. “Seem” is the operative term there. You’ll soon find that, beneath the surface, you’ll get to enjoy three important benefits when you know about design movements and what they can do, namely:
Understanding movements gives you metaphors and references, not just “make it flat” but “make it like De Stijl grid clarity” or “like Arts and Crafts tactility.” That versatility helps you design more memorable and coherent experiences. Knowledge of design movement context can help you avoid treating design as isolated elements and, instead, view interaction, layout, tone, visual style, and even technological affordances as part of a larger culture of design.
Design movements encode values, such as craft, honesty, function, and sustainability: things you might notice when you look deeper at what the forms and visuals mean. When you pick a style for your UX design, you implicitly pick those values. And when you’re aware, you’ll find yourself more empowered to design more consciously and with clearer direction, being able to see things from far above the surface.
Users bring cultural expectations which design history has shaped. If you lean into a minimal, Bauhaus-inspired interface, for example, a user is going to expect certain behaviors of it: things like clean structure, minimal ornamentation, fast performance. If you ignore that, you’ll risk confusing them, such as a Bauhaus-looking design that might have too much going on inside it to actually be Bauhaus. However, if you design intentionally with that history in mind, you meet implicit expectations. There’s another “plus” in this, too: knowing about design movements can help you recognize recurring patterns in design decision-making, such as minimalism, ornamentation, modularity, and material honesty.
Speaking of culture, in this video, Alan Dix, Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, explains how cultural differences shape how users interpret interfaces and why thoughtful localization helps you meet those expectations.
Copyright holder: Tommi Vainikainen _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Copyright holder: Maik Meid _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons _ Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norge_93.jpg
Copyright holder: Paju _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons _ Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kaivokselan_kaivokset_kyltti.jpg
Copyright holder: Tiia Monto _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons _ Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turku_-_harbour_sign.jpg
While it’s not an exhaustive list, you can find “major players” below in terms of movements that have left their mark, and not just on the floors of antique stores, walls of art galleries, and boulevards of beautifully historic neighborhoods. It’s loosely grouped into sections that capture the type of contribution and status each movement has.
This movement reacted to the industrial revolution’s mass production by celebrating craftsmanship and honesty in materials. It favored handmade objects, visible construction, and utility.
You can use this legacy when you’re designing with a human touch, and think tactile micro-interactions, transparent processes, and experiences that feel crafted, not generic.
Founded in the Netherlands, De Stijl emphasized pure geometry, primary colors, and harmony through simplicity. It aimed to remove personal expression in favor of universal clarity.
De Stijl (Dutch for “the style”) shows up in clean grid systems, modular design, and minimalist UIs (user interfaces). When you want to create a balanced, rational experience, De Stijl’s principles can help you keep things focused and uncluttered.
Bauhaus merged art, craft, and industrial design, with a belief that design should be functional, democratic, and visually balanced. “Form follows function” became its core principle.
This one’s a root of modern UX, although Bauhaus wasn’t UX design’s sole “source” of “form follows function.” From flat design to user-first interfaces, Bauhaus influences usability, layout consistency, and the idea that beautiful things should work well for everyone.
With roots in postwar optimism, this movement favored clean lines, organic shapes, and ease of use in everyday products. It emphasized comfort and friendly minimalism.
So, how do 1950s’ sideboards, coffee tables, and the like translate to UX design? Well, Mid-Century Modern is great for consumer-facing apps and devices, so you can use this sensibility to design welcoming, accessible, emotionally warm products that avoid technical coldness.
This bold, playful movement rejected minimalism and instead embraced geometric forms, wild patterns, and vibrant color clashes to make design fun, loud, and unconventional.
UX-wise, Memphis is ideal for expressive, brand-heavy, or entertainment-driven interfaces. And, if your product targets younger users or niche creative audiences, this movement encourages experimentation and visual delight.
Also known as the International Style, this movement prioritized typography, grid alignment, and neutrality and emphasized legibility and order.
This one is another heavyweight in terms of influence on UX, and its style is foundational to web design and information architecture (IA). It influences layout grids, clear hierarchy, and logical visual flow, especially so in data-heavy dashboards or content-first designs.
In this video, William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd., explains how information architecture organizes content into clear structures that help users navigate complex digital spaces.
Postmodern design challenged modernist “truths” by embracing contradiction, playfulness, and cultural reference. It blurred high and low design, often with a sense of irony.
When you use it with care, postmodern cues can work well in branding, gamified systems, or interfaces that aim to surprise and provoke. It encourages you to break patterns, intentionally, but to be mindful with complexity and ambiguity and all that deconstructed meaning.
This internet-age movement mimics the raw, “unstyled” look of early web pages, and, sure, it emphasizes honesty and speed over visual polish.
Brutalism can be useful for experimental projects, developer tools, or communities that value authenticity over gloss. Note, however, that it’s not always going to be ideal for accessibility or broad appeal.
Developed by Google, Material Design blends tactile cues with digital clarity and uses shadows, layering, and motion to guide users and create depth.
Featuring widely across Android and web platforms in the 2020s, Material Design provides a clear system for visual hierarchy and interaction feedback. As such, it can be a strong choice for scalable, accessible designs you can put your brand stamp on.
In this video, Frank Spillers, Service Designer, Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how Material Design provides clear affordances, strong hierarchy, and accessible contrast to support clean, scalable interfaces.
A kind of short-lived but eye-catching trend that combined soft shadows and subtle depth, neomorphism is a soft, minimalist “cousin” of skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphic designs include lined-paper icons for notepad applications and the recycle bin or trashcan icon as a holding area for deleted files on a laptop, for instance.
While it’s visually interesting, this one can sometimes be not all that great for accessibility. So, if you use neumorphic styles, test them carefully for contrast and usability, especially on touch interfaces.
Watch as this video explains how accessibility ensures that digital products remain usable and enjoyable for people with disabilities.
As a response to skeuomorphism, flat design removed shadows, gradients, and depth, and it emphasized clarity, speed, and content over visual decoration.
Flat design is clean, efficient, and scalable, but it can lack affordance; for an idea as to how important affordances are, think of door handles. Make sure your minimalist choices still signal interaction clearly; users need cues to act properly.
Explore how visible affordances and clear signifiers help users understand what actions are possible in a design, in this video.
More of a philosophy than a visual style, sustainable design prioritizes environmental responsibility, lifecycle awareness, and long-term value. And it’s pretty much what it sounds like: looking out for people, communities, the planet, and designers doing right by designing mindfully for them.
In UX design, with all the screens and things that appear on them to help people, this means designing for durability, repairability, and ethical use. It’s like an “anthem” for building experiences that respect user time, reduce friction, and avoid dark patterns or manipulative nudges.
Human-centered design focuses on understanding human user needs, behaviors, and contexts through research and iteration. It emerged from design thinking and systems design and “humanized” the user considerably; better still, it evolved into humanity-centered design and advanced the cause of designing well and mindfully with a truly noble goal in sight.
Centering design around humans and humanity is foundational to a UX practice, as it reminds you to base design decisions on empathy, testing, and evidence that impact humans and the wider ecosystem in which humans need to thrive. That’s far better, and infinitely more inspiring, than designing with assumptions or aesthetics alone.
In this video, Don Norman, Father of User Experience (UX) design, author of the legendary book “The Design of Everyday Things,” and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, shows you how humanity-centered design builds on empathy and user research by encouraging you to address root problems, consider interconnected systems, and refine solutions with the people they affect.
Understanding these movements gives you a richer vocabulary and sharper judgment. Here’s how to put that knowledge to work:
Ask yourself: “What movement does this design borrow from, consciously or not?” If it’s a clean, grid-based layout, it might echo Swiss design. If it’s a bold splash page with animated shapes, then possibly Memphis.
If your users want speed and clarity, Swiss or Material Design might make the best sense. If you’re building a creative platform, maybe Postmodernism or Memphis can help you stand out. Knowing the use cases can help you attune your design choices to what users really want in a design.
In this video, William Hudson explains how use cases help you bridge the gap between requirements and design by mapping every interaction between a system and the outside world.
Don’t copy the look; adapt the logic. Bauhaus didn’t mean “make it grey and minimalist”; it meant “remove what doesn’t serve function.” Arts and Crafts didn’t mean “add decoration”; it meant “show the process honestly.” That’s a vital point. The movements happened the way they did and their product designs looked the way they did as they occurred during their respective eras. The movements’ designers created within the respective context of their times; things would be different now for them if they hadn’t emerged then. If, for example, Bauhaus hadn’t existed at the time but “came along” later, then it possibly wouldn’t have produced those signature styles quite as we know them now; and it wouldn’t have been “Bauhaus.” So, as you’re in a different era from them, design with intention instead of lifting a style from the past and replicating it for the sake of a “retro” look in your own UI.
Share your movement references with your team or stakeholders and the rationale for doing so. You might say, “We’re using a Mid-Century Modern approach for warmth and simplicity,” or “We’re testing Brutalist layouts to increase authenticity.” And if some stakeholders like it just because it “looks cool,” you can smile because you know the real reasons have deeper foundations.
Users bring expectations shaped by visual history that makes sense to them. Their mental model may help them find that a flat button feels tappable, or it might make it invisible to them. Use design movement cues to guide users, not confuse them.
Overall, design movements offer far more than just style guides; they give you historical insight, cultural depth, and design reasoning to help get your own design right. When you learn their patterns, values, and visual languages, you can design with purpose and not just fall in with a trend or (perhaps worse) mimic for the sake of “quaintness.” For example, unless you’re designing a 1920s-themed site for an era-related purpose, don’t lift the form without reckoning carefully on the reason.
Whether you borrow the harmony of De Stijl, the clarity of Swiss design, or the ethical rigor of human-centered practices, movements help you anchor your UX decisions in something bigger. They make your interfaces not only usable, but meaningful, too. Speaking of meaning, remember to keep in step with the spirit of design movements. And take heart from knowing that the more you know about where design has been, the better the chances are that you can shape where it’s heading. You can make it a great destination for your users, your brand, and the product itself.
Delve right into User Experience design from the start, in our course User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide.
Enjoy where design is moving towards in our Master Class Design for the 21st Century with Don Norman, Founding Director - Design Lab, University of California, San Diego. Co-Founder, Nielsen Norman Group.
Discover a wealth of insights about design movements you can apply to your own design solutions, in our article Build a common language by referring to design movements.
Find fascinating and helpful points about how to design to insightfully balance “fresh and familiar” for contemporary audiences and into the future, using the MAYA principle.
Design history gives you a solid design foundation. By studying past movements like Bauhaus or Swiss Style, you can learn timeless principles, like clarity, usability, and visual hierarchy, that still drive effective UX today. This knowledge helps you recognize why certain solutions work and gives you the confidence to defend your design decisions.
When you draw on historical insights, you bring depth to your work, avoid reinventing the wheel, and align your designs with what users subconsciously expect.
Explore how effective user research helps give you that strong foundation you need to design upon.
Bauhaus shaped today’s UX and UI by promoting “form follows function.” It taught designers to strip away the unnecessary and focus on usability. Clean lines, grids, and geometric shapes you see in interfaces today come straight from Bauhaus thinking.
The movement also united art and industry, much like how UX connects visual design with technical development. Today’s minimalist design systems and modular components reflect the Bauhaus legacy in digital form.
Find more insights about form, function, and more in our article Aesthetics and form need to hold hands.
Modernism revolutionized design by championing rationality, clarity, and purpose. These values became the bedrock of UX principles. It moved design away from decoration and toward problem-solving. Concepts like consistency, hierarchy, and user-focused content came directly from the Modernist belief in simplicity and order.
UX practices like wireframing, information architecture, and task flows all reflect a Modernist approach: design must serve a function, not just please the eye.
Explore the world of wireframing for important insights to help you set off in the right design direction.
Minimalism pushes you to remove clutter and focus on what users truly need. It promotes clean layouts, clear typography, and purposeful interactions. This improves usability by reducing cognitive load and guiding users smoothly through tasks.
Many successful apps, like Google Search, embrace minimalism to offer intuitive, distraction-free experiences. When used well, minimalism can increase user trust and boost conversions by making interfaces feel effortless and efficient.
Discover essential design tips, including about minimalism, in our article Top 10 UI Trends Every Designer Should Know.
Swiss Style revolutionized interface design with its focus on grids, alignment, and typography. These principles help you create clean, balanced layouts that support user scanning and comprehension. Grid systems in many UI frameworks owe their structure to Swiss Style. The use of sans-serif fonts, asymmetric layouts, and visual hierarchy all trace back to this movement. Swiss Style taught designers to communicate clearly and prioritize function, and that’s a perfect match for digital design.
Get a greater grasp of grid systems for important insights into how to make better designs with them.
To apply design movement principles, start by choosing a movement aligned with your project goals. For example, use Bauhaus for functional clarity, Swiss Style for layout precision, or Minimalism for focus and simplicity. Study how these movements approached composition, color, and typography. Then, apply those rules when designing UI components, setting grids, or creating visual hierarchies. The goal isn’t to replicate a style, but to borrow its wisdom to solve modern UX problems more effectively.
Explore how to make the best choices for the typography of your user interfaces.
Not necessarily, but aligning with a movement can provide structure and clarity. Use a movement’s principles as a guiding framework, not a strict rulebook. For example, apply Minimalism to keep the UI focused, or draw from Swiss Style for a clean layout. Let your product goals, brand identity, and user needs dictate which elements to adopt.
Mixing influences often leads to a more distinctive design than following one movement rigidly and can improve UX if you do it thoughtfully. Blending Bauhaus simplicity with Swiss Style structure, for instance, can result in both clarity and usability. But careless mixing can confuse users or create visual inconsistency.
Always prioritize user goals over aesthetic experimentation. Test combinations with real users and refine based on feedback. When principles complement rather than clash, you create a richer, more effective design system.
Speaking of influences, explore how to design to delight users and more, in our article The 7 Factors that Influence User Experience.
Look for visual and functional clues. Swiss Style features clean grids and sans-serif fonts. Bauhaus uses geometric shapes and prioritizes function. Minimalism strips down to essentials. Modernism values clarity and rational structure. Arts and Crafts emphasizes craftsmanship and detail.
Pay attention to layout, typography, spacing, and the designer’s intent. Recognizing these traits helps you reverse-engineer design logic and draw inspiration for your own, original work.
Delve into design history to tighten your grasp of the past and knowledge that can help you with now.
Strictly following one movement can limit creativity and ignore user needs. For example, extreme Minimalism might oversimplify and frustrate users looking for context. Or rigid Swiss Style grids might not suit a brand’s emotional tone.
Your UX design must adapt to real-world users, not just design philosophies. Use movements as flexible frameworks, not rigid systems, and always prioritize usability and context over stylistic purity.
Understand user needs to give yourself a strong foundation on which to build your design decisions.
Charnley, K. (2020). Art, design and modernity: The Bauhaus and beyond. Open Arts Journal, 9, 43–56.
This article examines the legacy of the Bauhaus by juxtaposing the work of László Moholy-Nagy and Anni Albers to reveal a richer, more nuanced vision of design modernity than the dominant narrative of industrial “machine aesthetics” suggests. Charnley argues that the Bauhaus cannot be fully understood without acknowledging its pluralistic and hybrid practices, including handcrafts and textiles. This critique expands the historiography of design beyond the narrow confines of function-driven modernism and encourages a more inclusive account that appreciates the roles of gender, materiality, and embodied practice. The article is widely cited in design history for this reframing.
Woodham, J. M. (2001). Designing design history: From Pevsner to postmodernism. Working Papers in Culture, Discourse and Communication, 1(1), 1–12.
In this foundational essay, Woodham traces the development of design history as an academic discipline, from early art historical approaches (e.g., Nikolaus Pevsner’s work) to more socially contextual and interdisciplinary models that emerged with postmodernism. He critiques how design history has often been reduced to discussions of style and elite designers, calling instead for an approach that includes mass production, material culture, and socio-economic conditions. This article has been influential in legitimizing design history as a scholarly field and in broadening its scope to intersect with sociology, cultural studies, and critical theory.
Bloomsbury Publishing. (2024). The Design History Reader (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.
This anthology‑style volume brings together a wide array of seminal texts, both original primary writings (by designers, critics, reformers) and key secondary analyses, spanning from the 17th century to the present day. The updated 2024 edition broadens its scope globally, addressing not only canonical European and American design movements, but also issues such as decolonization, sustainability, gender, and globalization.
Remember, the more you learn about design, the more you make yourself valuable.
Improve your UX / UI Design skills and grow your career! Join IxDF now!
You earned your gift with a perfect score! Let us send it to you.
We've emailed your gift to name@email.com.
Improve your UX / UI Design skills and grow your career! Join IxDF now!
Here's the entire UX literature on Design Movements by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:
We believe in Open Access and the democratization of knowledge. Unfortunately, world-class educational materials such as this page are normally hidden behind paywalls or in expensive textbooks.
If you want this to change, , link to us, or join us to help us democratize design knowledge!
