Design Trivia
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93 free Design trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Good design hides in plain sight: the Coke bottle you can recognise in the dark, the Tube map that lied about geography and became a model for transit maps everywhere, the Swoosh a student sold for $35, the sticky note that started as a failed super-glue. This design trivia quiz celebrates all of it, from Bauhaus and Art Deco to Helvetica, Comic Sans, the Eames lounge chair, the Vespa, the Rubik's Cube, Lego, the little black dress and Apple's industrial design. It mixes graphic design, product and furniture design, typography, fashion and design history, so it suits designers, architects, art students and anyone who has ever argued about fonts. Questions run from easy (who founded the Bauhaus, what does 'Lego' mean) to expert-level detail about patents, prototypes and the people who never got credit. Every answer was checked against museum records and encyclopaedic sources before publishing, and each question carries a citation to the page it came from.
30 of 93 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which architect founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1919?
Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius's school was pushed out of Weimar by right-wing political pressure, so it reopened in Dessau in 1925.
Q 02Which city's UNESCO-listed 'White City' is famed for its 1930s Bauhaus-style buildings?
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv: its architects, trained in Europe before emigrating, adapted modernist ideas to the city's hot climate.
Q 03Which car did Alec Issigonis design for BMC after the 1956 Suez Crisis brought fuel rationing?
The Mini
The Mini: to seat four passengers in a tiny, fuel-efficient car, Issigonis turned the engine sideways to drive the front wheels.
Q 04Dieter Rams, longtime head of design at Braun, is known for which motto?
Less, but better
Less, but better: in the 1970s Rams asked himself whether his own design was good design, and his answer became his ten principles.
Q 05Braun's 1956 SK 4 radiogram earned what nickname for its clear acrylic lid?
Snow White's coffin
Snow White's coffin: Dieter Rams added the see-through lid, breaking with radios built to look like traditional furniture.
Q 06Charles Eames wanted his 1956 lounge chair to have 'the warm, receptive look' of what?
A well-used first baseman's mitt
A well-used first baseman's mitt: Charles and Ray Eames were reinventing the old English club chair in moulded plywood and leather.
Q 07Which American company has manufactured the Eames Lounge Chair since it launched in 1956?
Herman Miller
Herman Miller: the chair became an icon of modern design, yet when it first came out it didn't look modern at all.
Q 08How much was Portland State student Carolyn Davidson paid for designing the Nike Swoosh in 1971?
$35
$35: Phil Knight's first verdict was 'I don't love it, but maybe it will grow on me', yet in 1983 Nike gave Davidson company stock.
Q 09The 1915 Coca-Cola contour bottle's shape was based on a picture of what?
A cocoa pod
A cocoa pod: finding nothing on coca or kola at the library, designer Earl Dean sketched a cocoa pod from an Encyclopaedia Britannica picture instead.
Q 10Which draughtsman devised London's diagrammatic Tube map in 1931?
Harry Beck
Harry Beck drew it after being laid off, and it was rejected at first before the 1933 pocket edition proved a hit.
Q 11What was 3M's Spencer Silver trying to make in 1968 when he stumbled on the Post-it adhesive?
A super-strong glue
A super-strong glue was the goal, but Silver made a weak, reusable adhesive that found no use until colleague Art Fry anchored his hymnal bookmarks with it.
Q 12Why were the original Post-it notes canary yellow?
The lab next door had yellow scrap paper
The lab next door had yellow scrap paper, so the colour was chance; a free-sample blitz in Boise, Idaho, then paved the way for the 1980 US launch.
Q 13George Carwardine designed the Anglepoise lamp while working on what?
Q 21Milton Glaser sketched the 'I ❤ NY' logo in what unlikely place?
The back of a taxi
The back of a taxi: Glaser sketched it in red crayon, and he did the whole job for free.
Q 22Which typeface did Vincent Connare design to make Microsoft Bob look less formal?
Comic Sans
Comic Sans was finished too late for Microsoft Bob, so it debuted instead in the speech bubbles of Microsoft 3D Movie Maker.
Q 23Which serif typeface was commissioned by a British newspaper in 1931?
Times New Roman
Times New Roman: Stanley Morison designed it for The Times, and a year after its debut it was released for commercial sale.
Vehicle suspension systems
Vehicle suspension systems: Carwardine's spring-balanced lamp drew so much demand that spring makers Herbert Terry & Sons took over making it.
Q 14Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel Wassily chair, designed at the Bauhaus in 1925–26, was inspired by what?
Bicycle construction
Bicycle construction: Breuer bought his first bicycle in 1925 and was struck by how light and strong its tubular steel frame was.
Q 15The Vespa scooter's name is Italian for what?
Wasp
Wasp: on first seeing the 1946 prototype, Enrico Piaggio exclaimed 'Sembra una vespa!', 'It looks like a wasp!', and the name stuck.
Q 16Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair is an icon of which art movement?
De Stijl
De Stijl: the chair began as plain, unpainted wood, and Rietveld painted it in its famous colours only years later.
Q 17Which rival knife maker did Victorinox buy in 2005?
Wenger
Wenger: by 2013 Victorinox had folded Wenger's knives into its own brand.
Q 18The IKEA Billy bookcase was designed in 1979 by Gillis Lundgren, who first sketched it where?
On the back of a napkin
On the back of a napkin: Lundgren kept Billy timeless, since people keep adding to a bookcase as their collections grow.
Q 19After being ousted from Apple, Steve Jobs hired Paul Rand to design which company's identity?
NeXT
NeXT: Jobs paid Rand $100,000 in 1986, and Rand made his case in a presentation book that walked through the black-cube logo step by step.
Q 20Saul Bass's animated paper cut-out titles opened which 1955 Otto Preminger film?
The Man with the Golden Arm
The Man with the Golden Arm: Bass chose a jagged, disjointed arm as the central image because the film was about heroin addiction, then a taboo subject.
Q 24Which British designer led Apple's iMac and iPhone design and left in 2019 to found LoveFrom?
Jony Ive
Jony Ive left Apple as an employee, yet Apple signed on as one of the primary clients of his new design company.
Q 25Raymond Loewy, designer of the Shell logo and Lucky Strike pack, also designed the livery of which aircraft?
Air Force One
Air Force One: until Loewy's 1962 redesign with John and Jacqueline Kennedy, presidential jets still wore a military red, orange and black scheme.
Q 26Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif lemon squeezer for Alessi was inspired by the shape of what?
A squid
A squid: Starck sketched the squeezer while eating a plate of squid and squeezing a lemon over it.
Q 27Which Italian designer founded the postmodern Memphis Group in 1980?
Ettore Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass: the group took its name from Bob Dylan's 'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again', played over and over at its first meeting.
Q 28Alvar Aalto's wavy 1936 glass vase takes its common name from which Helsinki establishment?
The Savoy restaurant
The Savoy restaurant, which has used the vases since 1937; Aalto first entered the design in a glassworks competition as 'The Eskimo woman's leather trousers'.
Q 29Which architect coined the maxim 'form follows function'?
Louis Sullivan
It is often wrongly credited to the sculptor Horatio Greenough, whose functionalist essays were forgotten until the 1930s.
Q 30Which command-key symbol did Susan Kare choose for the original Macintosh?
The looped square
The looped square: Steve Jobs felt so many Apple logos in the menus took the logo in vain, so Kare picked a symbol used in Sweden to mark places of interest.