Graphic Design Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Graphic Design trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Graphic design trivia questions with answers. Graphic design hides in plain sight on every logo, poster and screen you look at, and this quiz covers the people and ideas behind it. It runs from Gutenberg and the Bauhaus to the Swiss grid: Helvetica's real name, Futura's geometry, Times New Roman's newspaper, Gill Sans and the London Underground, Garamond, Trajan on film posters, Comic Sans and Microsoft Bob, kerning, serifs, CMYK and lorem ipsum. Then the designers and their marks: Paul Rand's striped IBM, Saul Bass's title sequences and the AT&T globe, Milton Glaser's taxi-cab I Love NY, Massimo Vignelli's subway map, Carolyn Davidson's $35 Swoosh, Lindon Leader's FedEx arrow, Frank Robinson's Spencerian Coca-Cola, Susan Kare's Mac icons, Peter Saville's Factory sleeves, Neville Brody, David Carson, Shepard Fairey's Hope poster, Chermayeff & Geismar, Adrian Frutiger and Jan Tschichold. It finishes with the tools: Bezier curves from Renault, PostScript, PageMaker and the birth of desktop publishing, Photoshop's Knoll brothers, and Pantone's Color of the Year. Easy questions ask what CMYK stands for and who designed the Swoosh. Medium ones cover typefaces and famous logos. Hard ones want the concert hall behind Muller-Brockmann's posters, the car company behind Bezier curves, the photographer behind the Hope poster and the town where Pantone is based. Every answer has been checked against reference articles on design history, typefaces and designers, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Helvetica was originally released in 1957 under what name?
Neue Haas Grotesk
Neue Haas Grotesk was drawn in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein; parent company Stempel renamed it Helvetica in 1960 for wider marketing.
Q 02The name 'Helvetica' is Latin for what?
Swiss
Helvetica means Swiss: Helvetia was the Roman name for the region, and the name was adopted in 1960 to trade on the country's reputation for modern graphic design when the typeface was marketed abroad.
Q 03Which of these is a hallmark of the Swiss or International Typographic Style?
Asymmetric layouts on a grid with flush-left text
Asymmetric layouts on a grid with flush-left text, set ragged-right in sans-serif faces such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, defined the style that Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann taught in Basel in the 1950s.
Q 04Futura, the geometric sans-serif released in 1927, was designed by whom?
Paul Renner
Paul Renner drew Futura for the Bauer foundry between 1924 and 1927, building it from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares in the spirit of the New Frankfurt housing programme.
Q 05The serif face Stanley Morison created for a newspaper in 1931 took its name from which paper?
The Times of London
The Times of London commissioned the typeface after Stanley Morison of Monotype criticised its printing; Victor Lardent of the paper's advertising department drew it under Morison's direction, based on Plantin, and it debuted in 1932.
Q 06Gill Sans (1928) grew out of Edward Johnston's corporate typeface for which organisation?
London Underground
Eric Gill had assisted Edward Johnston on the London Underground lettering as a young artist; Stanley Morison of Monotype then commissioned Gill Sans, released in 1928, as a more classical development of that sans.
Q 07Garamond typefaces are named after a Parisian engraver of which century?
16th
Claude Garamond cut his roman types in Paris in the 16th century, dying in 1561; many later 'Garamond' revivals were actually based on the 17th-century punchcutter Jean Jannon.
Q 08Adobe's 1989 typeface by Carol Twombly, ubiquitous on film posters, is based on the inscription on what?
Trajan's Column in Rome
Trajan's Column in Rome, dedicated in AD 113, carries the inscription whose Roman square capitals Carol Twombly traced for her 1989 typeface Trajan.
Q 09Vincent Connare designed Comic Sans in 1994 for which software product, then missed the deadline?
Microsoft Bob
Microsoft Bob's cartoon dog Rover spoke in speech bubbles set in a formal serif; Connare drew a replacement inspired by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, but it missed Bob's release and shipped with Windows 95 Plus! instead.
Q 10In typography, what does 'kerning' adjust?
The space between two specific characters
The space between two specific characters is what kerning adjusts, such as tucking an A under a V; in metal type a kern was the part of a letter that overhung its body, from the French 'carne', a projecting angle.
Q 11In the CMYK printing model, what does the K stand for?
Key (black)
K stands for Key (black): the key plate carried the detail and the other plates were registered to it; CMYK is subtractive, with inks reducing the light reflected from white paper.
Q 12The placeholder text 'Lorem ipsum' is a scrambled version of a work by which Roman author?
Cicero
Cicero wrote De finibus bonorum et malorum in 45 BC; a garbled passage from its first book became the printers' placeholder, and Letraset transfer sheets spread it in the 1960s.
Q 13Wim Crouwel's 1967 experimental typeface, built only from horizontal and vertical strokes, is called what?
New Alphabet
New Alphabet was Wim Crouwel's 1967 response to early cathode-ray typesetting: every letter is built from horizontal and vertical strokes on a grid, so it is barely legible and was meant as a provocation rather than a text face.
Q 21What is hidden in the negative space between the E and the x of the FedEx logo?
A right-pointing arrow
A right-pointing arrow sits in the white space between the E and the x; Lindon Leader of Landor drew a proprietary blend of Univers and Futura in 1994 so the two letters would meet cleanly.
Q 22The Coca-Cola logo, created in 1885 by bookkeeper Frank Mason Robinson, uses which handwriting style?
Spencerian script
Spencerian script, the formal business hand taught from Platt Rogers Spencer's copybooks, was the dominant American penmanship of the 1800s; Robinson, who also coined the name, lettered the logo in it.
Q 23Susan Kare drew the first Macintosh icons on what?
Graph paper
Q 14Paul Rand's defining corporate identity, designed in 1956 and striped in 1972, was for which company?
IBM
IBM asked Paul Rand to redraw its logo in 1956; his striped version of 1972 used horizontal bars as a half-toning trick to lighten the heavy letters, and eight-bar and thirteen-bar forms exist.
Q 15Saul Bass's first celebrated title sequence, a cut-out of a heroin addict's arm, was for which 1955 film?
The Man with the Golden Arm
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) opened with Bass's jagged white cut-out of an arm for Otto Preminger; he went on to title North by Northwest and Psycho and to design corporate logos.
Q 16Which of these logos was designed by Saul Bass's firm?
The AT&T globe (1983)
The AT&T globe (1983), the striped sphere nicknamed the Death Star, was created by Bass's firm for the company after the Bell breakup; the firm had also drawn the 1969 Bell System bell and the Geffen Records logo.
Q 17Where did Milton Glaser sketch the I Love New York logo in 1976?
In the back of a taxi
In the back of a taxi, Glaser drew the I Love New York mark in red crayon on scrap paper in 1976 for a state tourism campaign run by the agency Wells Rich Greene.
Q 18Milton Glaser co-founded which influential New York studio in 1954?
Push Pin Studios
Push Pin Studios was founded in 1954 by Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins and Edward Sorel; Glaser stayed until 1974, and his 1966 Bob Dylan poster came out of that period.
Q 19Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York subway map was criticised for what?
Sacrificing geographical accuracy for clarity
Sacrificing geographical accuracy for clarity was the charge: the 1972 diagram squared off Central Park and spaced stations evenly, and the MTA replaced it in 1979; Vignelli also designed the subway signage at Unimark.
Q 20How much was Carolyn Davidson paid in 1971 for designing the Nike Swoosh?
$35
$35 was Davidson's fee for the 1971 Swoosh, billed at two dollars an hour as a Portland State design student; in 1983 Phil Knight gave her a gold Swoosh ring and Nike shares.
Graph paper was her pixel grid: Kare sketched 32-by-32 squares in a $2.50 notebook in 1983, producing the scissors for Cut, the paintbrush for MacPaint and the Happy Mac.
Q 24Peter Saville designed record sleeves for Joy Division and New Order as a partner in which label?
Factory Records
Factory Records was founded in Manchester in 1978 by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus, with Saville as the art-director partner; his Closer sleeve, a photograph of an entombed Christ from a Genoa tomb, caused unease after Ian Curtis's death.
Q 25Neville Brody made his name as art director of which British style magazine in the early 1980s?
The Face
The Face, the London style magazine Nick Logan launched in 1980, had Brody as art director from 1981 to 1986; he then art-directed Arena and designed the typefaces Industria and Blur.
Q 26David Carson, the 'grunge typography' pioneer of Ray Gun magazine, had which earlier career?
Professional surfer
Professional surfer was Carson's first career, with a top-ten world ranking; a sociology graduate who taught high school, he art-directed Beach Culture before Ray Gun launched in 1992.
Q 27Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster was based on a photograph taken by whom?
AP freelancer Mannie Garcia
AP freelancer Mannie Garcia took the April 2006 photograph at the National Press Club; Fairey's stencil portrait in red, beige and blue ran with the words 'progress', 'hope' or 'change', and the AP's copyright claim was settled in 2011.
Q 28Which New York firm, founded in 1957, designed logos for Chase, Mobil, PBS, NBC and National Geographic?
Chermayeff & Geismar
Chermayeff & Geismar began in 1957 as Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar; Yale graduates Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar drew the Chase octagon in 1961 and the Mobil wordmark with its red o in 1964.
Q 29Jan Tschichold, author of Die neue Typographie, later directed the visual identity of which publisher?
Penguin Books
Penguin Books hired Tschichold in 1947; over three years he reset hundreds of titles and wrote the Penguin Composition Rules. He had fled to Basel in 1933 after a Nazi arrest and later designed Sabon.
Q 30Herbert Bayer's 'universal' typeface for the Bauhaus was notable for what?
Being all lowercase
Being all lowercase was the point: Bayer's 1925 Universal dropped capitals as redundant, built its letters from circles and straight lines, and was never cast as real type; Gropius had made him head of the school's printing and advertising workshop.