Reacting against a world gone mad, the participants in movement claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. They bitterly rebelled against the horrors of the world war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes. Through a synthesis of spontaneous chance actions with planned decisions, they further rid typographic design of its traditional precepts and continued the concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes, not just phonetic symbols.