99 Fun Facts About Graphic Design

Under what name was the typeface Helvetica originally released?

Neue Haas Grotesk was drawn by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein; parent company Stempel renamed it Helvetica to sell it in Germany and abroad.

The name 'Helvetica' is Latin for what?

Swiss is what the Latin adjective Helvetica means; the first proposal was Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, but Eduard Hoffmann objected that a sewing machine maker and an insurer already used it.

Which is a hallmark of the International Typographic Style of the 1950s?

Asymmetric layouts on a grid with flush-left text marked the style taught by Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder; its designers chose photographs over illustration because they wanted to present information objectively.

Futura, the geometric sans-serif released in 1927, was designed by whom?

Paul Renner began sketching Futura in 1924 for the Bauer foundry, building it from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares; it became tied to the Bauhaus, though he never belonged to the school.

Stanley Morison's serif typeface, first printed in a newspaper in October 1932, took its name from which paper?

The Times of London commissioned Times New Roman after Stanley Morison of Monotype criticised its printing; Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in the paper's advertising department, drew it under his direction.

Gill Sans grew out of Edward Johnston's corporate typeface for which organisation?

London Underground commissioned Edward Johnston's lettering; Eric Gill, who had studied lettering under Johnston and worked on that design, later reworked its ideas into Gill Sans for Stanley Morison at Monotype.

Which serif typeface family is named after a 16th-century Parisian punchcutter?

Garamond honours Claude Garamond, who died in Paris in 1561, yet several famous revivals sold under his name were really copied from types cut in the next century by Jean Jannon.

Carol Twombly's 1989 typeface, modelled on classical capital letters, is based on the inscription on what?

Trajan's Column in Rome was erected in AD 113; Carol Twombly drew her typeface Trajan from a copy of a full-size rubbing of the inscription on its base, which her team hung on a hallway wall.

Vincent Connare designed Comic Sans in 1994 for which software product, then missed the deadline?

Microsoft Bob's cartoon dog Rover spoke in speech bubbles set in a formal serif; Connare drew a replacement modelled on comics such as The Dark Knight Returns, but it missed Bob's release and shipped with Windows 95 Plus! instead.

In typography, what does 'kerning' adjust?

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, like the head of an f.

In the CMYK printing model, what does the K stand for?

Key (black) is the K: on old presses the key plate, usually inked darkest, carried an image's detail and contrast; CMYK is subtractive, its inks cutting the light reflected from white paper.

The placeholder text 'Lorem ipsum' is a scrambled version of a work by which Roman author?

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.

Wim Crouwel's 1967 experimental typeface, built only from horizontal and vertical strokes, is called what?

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, not for everyday reading.

Paul Rand's defining corporate identity, designed in 1956 and striped in 1972, was for which company?

IBM hired Paul Rand in 1956 to redraw its logo; his 1972 version sliced the letters into eight horizontal bars, and the company has kept that basic design unchanged ever since.

Saul Bass made his name with the animated title sequence for which 1955 film about drug addiction?

The Man with the Golden Arm starred Frank Sinatra as an addict; Bass's animated cut-out arm for director Otto Preminger turned the usually static opening credits into part of the film.

Which of these logos was designed by Saul Bass's firm?

The AT&T globe (1983) came from Bass's firm because the breakup of the Bell System made the company give up the bell symbol, which the same firm had redrawn in 1969.

Where did Milton Glaser first sketch the I Love New York logo?

In the back of a taxi, Glaser scribbled the mark on an envelope that is now in the Museum of Modern Art; he designed the state tourism logo for free.

Milton Glaser co-founded which influential New York design firm in 1954?

Push Pin Studios was founded in 1954 by Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins and Edward Sorel; its artists drew on comics, modern art and revived historical styles in a playful reaction to strict modernism.

Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York subway map was criticised for what?

Sacrificing geographical accuracy for clarity was the charge: Vignelli's 1972 diagram drew Central Park almost square and stations seemed misplaced, and after a flood of complaints the MTA replaced it in 1979.

How much was Carolyn Davidson paid in 1971 for designing the Nike Swoosh?

$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.

What is hidden in the negative space between the E and the x of the FedEx logo?

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.

The Coca-Cola logo, credited to bookkeeper Frank Mason Robinson, uses which handwriting style?

Spencerian script was devised around 1840 as a quick, clear hand for business, which is why a bookkeeper wrote in it; Robinson, who also named the drink, thought the two Cs would look well in advertising.

Susan Kare drew the first Macintosh icons on what?

Graph paper was her pixel grid: the on-screen icon editor had not been coded yet, so Kare pencilled the scissors for Cut and the paintbrush for MacPaint into a notebook, one square per pixel.

Peter Saville designed record sleeves for Joy Division and New Order as a partner in which label?

Factory Records was set up in Manchester by Tony Wilson and partners including Saville; as a co-founder and its art director, he was left unusually free to design sleeves however he wanted.

Neville Brody made his name as art director of which British style magazine in the early 1980s?

The Face, launched by Nick Logan in 1980, made Brody's name; he has called punk the biggest influence on the rule-breaking typography he brought to it before moving on to Arena.

David Carson, the 'grunge typography' pioneer of Ray Gun magazine, had which earlier career?

Professional surfer was Carson's first career, with a top-ten world ranking; he was teaching high school when a two-week design class in his mid-twenties set him on the path to Beach Culture and Ray Gun.

Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster drew a copyright claim from which news agency, whose photo he had used?

Associated Press said the poster copied an April 2006 photo by its freelancer Mannie Garcia; Fairey sued first, later admitted destroying evidence about which image he had used, and the two sides settled in 2011.

Which New York firm, founded in 1957, designed logos for Chase, Mobil and National Geographic?

Chermayeff & Geismar began in 1957 as Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar and took its shorter name when Robert Brownjohn left for London; Yale graduates Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar then made corporate identity their speciality.

Jan Tschichold, author of Die neue Typographie, later directed the visual identity of which publisher?

Penguin Books hired Tschichold from 1947 to 1949 to restyle some 500 paperbacks; by then the author of the modernist rulebook had turned against his own early doctrine and gone back to traditional, classical typography.

Herbert Bayer's 'universal' typeface for the Bauhaus was notable for what?

Being all lowercase was the point: Bayer dropped capitals to make writing and printing more efficient, drawing his geometric Universal letters as a single set, though the design was never cast as metal type.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in which city?

Weimar was where Gropius merged the Grand-Ducal art school and crafts school into the Bauhaus in 1919; it moved to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932 before closing under Nazi pressure in 1933.

Josef Müller-Brockmann's long-running poster series was for which venue?

The Zurich Tonhalle commissioned Müller-Brockmann's concert posters from 1950; over the years he made them ever more abstract, using pure geometric forms and repetition to echo the rhythm of the music.

Bezier curves, the backbone of vector graphics, are named after an engineer who used them to design what?

Renault car bodies were shaped with the curves in Pierre Bézier's UNISURF system, launched in 1968, which let designers define free-form surfaces mathematically and have machines mill the models.

PostScript, the page description language behind desktop publishing, was created at which company?

Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who left Xerox PARC to turn its page-description research into a product; PostScript went on sale in 1984 and powered the first LaserWriter printers.

Desktop publishing took off in 1985 with the LaserWriter printer and which software from Aldus?

PageMaker, released by Aldus in 1985, let users lay out whole pages on screen and print them just as shown; Aldus founder Paul Brainerd is credited with coining the term desktop publishing for what it started.

Photoshop was created in 1987 by which pair of brothers?

The Knolls wrote it in 1987: Thomas Knoll, a Michigan PhD student, built the program first called Display, and his brother John at Industrial Light & Magic pushed it toward the product that shipped commercially in 1990.

Which shade of blue did Pantone name as its first Color of the Year?

Cerulean, a sky blue, was chosen in 1999 to greet the new millennium with hopes of calm; a few years later the same shade got its own monologue in The Devil Wears Prada.

Pantone 448 C, a drab brown dubbed the world's ugliest colour, was chosen in Australia for what?

Plain cigarette packs in Australia were given the murky brown in 2012 after researchers tested shades on about a thousand smokers to find the most off-putting; smokers linked it with dirt, tar and death.

Which book did Johannes Gutenberg complete on his new printing press in Mainz around 1455?

A Latin Bible, set 42 lines to the page, came off Gutenberg's press in 1455; movable type had been tried in China centuries earlier, and his own breakthrough was casting durable metal letters in moulds.

Illustrator, the vector drawing program released in 1987, was originally developed for which computer?

Apple Macintosh users got it first: Illustrator was its maker's first application program, conceived by a co-founder to automate the manual tasks his wife did as a graphic designer.

Paula Scher's 1994 identity of bold wood-type lettering was for which New York theatre?

The Public Theater hired Paula Scher in 1994; her loud wood-type lettering, echoing street typography, was widely imitated and went on to influence much theatre advertising.

Which industrial designer, who shaped the InterCity 125 train, co-founded Pentagram in 1972?

Kenneth Grange, who also designed the Kenwood Chef mixer, reshaped the InterCity 125's nose on his own initiative, testing models at night in a wind tunnel at Imperial College London.

Otl Aicher led the design team and pictogram system for which Olympic Games?

Munich 1972 had Aicher as chief designer; his stick-figure pictograms, made so that visitors of any language could find their way, became a model for signs used around the world.

The Isotype pictorial-statistics system, first called the Vienna Method, was developed by whom?

Otto Neurath devised the method in the 1920s at the Vienna museum he directed, with artist Gerd Arntz drawing its symbols; it took the name Isotype only after he left Austria for the Netherlands in 1934.

The influential design magazine Emigre was founded in 1984 in which city?

Berkeley, California, was where Dutch émigré Rudy VanderLans launched Emigre in 1984; his partner Zuzana Licko drew its early bitmap typefaces, and the magazine's type foundry outlived the final issue, number 69, in 2005.

Which designer created the Apple logo in 1977 while working at Regis McKenna?

Rob Janoff, an art director at the Regis McKenna agency, drew the rainbow-striped bitten apple in 1977; he said the bite was for scale, so the fruit would not be mistaken for a cherry.

Alexey Brodovitch was art director of which American fashion magazine from 1934 to 1958?

Harper's Bazaar hired Brodovitch in 1934 because editor Carmel Snow wanted a modern look for the magazine; over 24 years his classes and pages trained photographers including Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.

Which brand consultancy designed the controversial logo for the London 2012 Olympic Games?

Wolff Olins was paid £400,000 for the jagged London 2012 mark, and within days of its unveiling in 2007 tens of thousands of people had signed a petition to have it scrapped.

Who first launched the First Things First manifesto, criticising consumerist design, in 1964?

Ken Garland wrote the manifesto in 1963 and published it the next year with fellow designers' signatures, urging the profession to do more useful work than selling; a new generation re-signed an updated version decades later.

Which symbol did Harvey Ball draw in ten minutes in 1963 for badges at an insurance company?

The smiley face was meant to lift staff morale after a merger. It earned Harvey Ball just $45, he never trademarked it, and more than 50 million smiley buttons had been sold by 1971.

Which symbol did Gerald Holtom design in 1958 by combining the flag semaphore signals for the letters N and D?

The peace sign began as the badge of Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which explains the N and D. Holtom said its drooping lines also showed a person in despair.

Which emblem did student Gary Anderson create in 1970 to win a design contest run by a packaging company?

The recycling symbol won Gary Anderson a $2,500 scholarship, and its endless loop is folded like a Möbius strip. It was never trademarked, so anyone may print it.

Which scientist joined the red and violet ends of the spectrum into a colour circle in his 1704 treatise Opticks?

Isaac Newton cut his colour circle into unequal slices, sized like the intervals of a musical scale. Every colour wheel a designer has spun since descends from it.

Which purplish-red colour, a standard printing ink, is named after an 1859 battle near a town in northern Italy?

Magenta was a new dye first sold as fuchsine, then renamed to celebrate a French and Sardinian victory over Austria at the Battle of Magenta. It is one of the three coloured inks of colour printing.

Which band paid art student John Pasche £50 in 1970 for a logo their singer wanted based on the goddess Kali?

The Rolling Stones got their tongue and lips after Mick Jagger suggested the tongue of the Hindu goddess Kali. In 2008 the Victoria and Albert Museum bought the original artwork for £51,000.

The set of 176 mobile-phone emoji now held by New York's Museum of Modern Art was drawn in 1999 in which country?

Japan is where Shigetaka Kurita drew the set for the phone company NTT Docomo. The word emoji is Japanese for picture character, and its likeness to the word emotion is pure coincidence.

James Montgomery Flagg used his own face for which figure on a famous 1917 US Army recruiting poster?

Uncle Sam got Flagg's own features, aged and given a white goatee, because the artist wanted to avoid the trouble of hiring a model. More than four million copies were printed during the First World War.

Which keyboard character began in ancient Roman handwriting as a joined-up form of the letters E and T?

The ampersand spells et, the Latin word for and. Children once recited it after Z as a 27th letter, and its name is a slurring of the phrase 'and per se and'.

Which colour model do phone and TV screens use, adding three primaries of light together to make white?

RGB stands for red, green and blue, and it is called additive because the coloured lights sum towards white. Printing inks work the other way, soaking up light instead.

Which term describes colour pairs, such as red and green, that sit opposite each other on a painter's colour wheel?

Complementary colours create the strongest contrast when placed side by side, yet mixing them cancels both out into a grey. They are also known as opposite colours.

Web colour codes such as #FF0000 for pure red are written in which number system?

Hexadecimal counts in sixteens, so two digits per colour can run from 00 to FF. The six digits of a web code set the strength of red, green and blue, in that order.

Which web image format, written as XML text, can be scaled to any size without losing quality?

SVG stores shapes as instructions instead of a fixed mosaic of dots, so a logo stays crisp on a phone or a billboard. Its files can even be opened and changed in a plain text editor.

Which image format, released by CompuServe in 1987, is limited to 256 colours but can hold simple animations?

GIF was meant to be said with a soft G: its chief creator Steve Wilhite wanted the name to echo the peanut butter brand Jif. He said so again when accepting a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013.

Which Photoshop feature, added in version 3.0 in 1994, lets designers stack and edit parts of an image separately?

Layers are stacked like sheets of transparent film, so a change can be made to one without touching the rest. They arrived in September 1994, four years after Photoshop 1.0.

Which online graphic design platform did Melanie Perkins co-found in Perth, Australia, in 2013?

Canva was valued at US$1 billion in January 2018, five years after its launch. It offers ready-made templates for posters, presentations and social media posts.

Which printing method, invented by the actor Alois Senefelder in 1796, relies on the fact that oil repels water?

Lithography takes its name from the Greek for stone, because the image was drawn in grease on a slab of smooth limestone. It was first used mostly for sheet music and maps.

Which stencil printing technique did Andy Warhol adopt in 1962 for his repeated portraits of Marilyn Monroe?

Silkscreen let Warhol repeat one publicity photo from the 1953 film Niagara as the fifty images of his Marilyn Diptych. Ink is forced through a fine mesh wherever a stencil leaves it open.

Which print term describes artwork extended about an eighth of an inch past the trim line to avoid white edges?

Bleed gives the guillotine a margin of error, because paper shifts slightly as a stack is cut. Without it, a sliver of unprinted paper can show along the edge.

Alphonse Mucha's posters of the actress Sarah Bernhardt are classics of which flowing, floral style of the 1890s?

Art Nouveau found its poster star by chance: Mucha's first Bernhardt design, for the play Gismonda, was a rush job ordered at Christmas 1894 with a New Year deadline.

Which French artist's 1891 poster of the cancan dancer La Goulue made the Moulin Rouge dance hall the talk of Paris?

Toulouse-Lautrec had never made a poster before this one, which followed an earlier Moulin Rouge design by Jules Chéret. About 3,000 copies went up around Paris.

Alexander Rodchenko's 1924 poster of a woman shouting through a cupped hand is a landmark of which Soviet art movement?

Constructivism counted Rodchenko among its founders, and in 1921 he gave up painting to concentrate on graphic design. The shouting woman was an advertisement for a publishing house.

Which movement did Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg launch in 1917, allowing only straight lines and primary colours?

De Stijl, Dutch for The Style, was also the name of the journal van Doesburg published to spread the group's ideas. Mondrian's own rules permitted only squares and rectangles.

Which technique of pasting photographs together did Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield and George Grosz pioneer in 1916?

Photomontage became a political weapon in Heartfield's hands: he fled Berlin in 1933, and his images attacking fascism later put him high on a Gestapo most-wanted list.

Wes Wilson's melting lettering on Fillmore concert posters defined the 1960s psychedelic style of which American city?

San Francisco had a 'Big Five' of poster artists, and Wilson said he wanted his lettering to be something people had to stop to figure out.

Which designer of floral wallpapers co-founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891 to print books by hand in a medieval style?

William Morris thought machine-printed books were shoddy, so each Kelmscott title was printed by hand in editions of about 300. He even drew his own typefaces, tracing enlarged photographs of old ones.

Which 1980s design group, led by Ettore Sottsass, took its name from a Bob Dylan song playing at its first meeting?

Memphis got its name because the Dylan song was playing on repeat that evening in December 1980. The Italian group's loud style then spread through the pop culture of the following decade.

Jim Fitzpatrick's two-tone 1968 poster turned Alberto Korda's photograph of which revolutionary into a worldwide icon?

Che Guevara spread so far because Fitzpatrick gave up copyright so that left-wing groups could use the image freely. In 2011 he moved to sign the image over to Guevara's family in Cuba.

Which British pop artist designed the collage cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album with Jann Haworth?

Peter Blake suggested surrounding the band with cardboard cut-outs of a crowd of their heroes. The finished collage holds 57 photographs and nine waxworks.

Which studio, named after graffiti on its founders' door, designed the cover of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon?

Hipgnosis began when Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell were asked by their friends in Pink Floyd to design the band's second album sleeve. The name puns on hypnosis, joining hip to gnosis, or ancient learning.

The adman George Lois designed more than 90 covers between 1962 and 1973 for which American magazine?

Esquire covers by Lois came to be treated as art: the Museum of Modern Art put 32 of them on show in 2008. Former colleagues later disputed how much of the work was his alone.

Which US agency's red 1975 logotype was nicknamed 'the worm' by staff who preferred its older 'meatball' emblem?

NASA dropped the worm in 1992 to lift the spirits of employees who had never accepted it, then revived it in 2020 as a secondary logo.

Jamie Reid's ransom-note lettering, cut from newspaper headlines, became the visual signature of which 1970s punk band?

Sex Pistols sleeves made Reid's name, though he had devised the ransom-note style years earlier for a radical political magazine he founded in 1970.

Which Scottish engineer, once an assistant to James Watt, invented the bar chart in 1786 and the pie chart in 1801?

William Playfair argued that charts communicate better than tables of data. His other careers included silversmith, banker, land speculator, convict and blackmailer.

Which German word names the school of psychology behind design principles such as proximity, similarity and closure?

Gestalt means form, and its psychologists argued that people perceive a whole pattern before its parts. The idea is often summed up as the whole being different from the sum of its parts.

Which Greek letter stands for the golden ratio of about 1.618, a proportion prized by many page designers?

Phi is said to have been chosen by the inventor Mark Barr, partly because it begins the name of the Greek sculptor Phidias. Barr himself doubted that Phidias ever used the proportion.

Which machine, first used at the New York Tribune in 1886, cast a whole row of metal type from a keyboard?

Linotype is short for line of type, because the machine cast each line as a single slug of hot metal. Its operator worked a keyboard of 90 characters.

Which former Bauhaus teacher wrote the 1963 classic Interaction of Color and painted the series Homage to the Square?

Josef Albers used his nested squares to explore how colours change one another. After the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933 he emigrated to the United States, where he later led the design department at Yale.

Which technique smooths the jagged, stair-step edges of on-screen type and curves by blending the boundary pixels?

Anti-aliasing softens the so-called jaggies, and it is often applied to on-screen lettering so that it looks closer to ink printed on a page.

Which interface style, abandoned by the iPhone in 2013, makes apps imitate real objects such as a paper desk calendar?

Skeuomorphism comes from Greek words for tool and shape, and it helps newcomers by making software look like familiar things. Its 2013 replacement was a flat look with brighter colours.

Which page-design program held an estimated 95% of its market in the 1990s before losing ground to InDesign?

QuarkXPress stumbled in 2002, when its new version failed to support Mac OS X while its rival's did. A widening price gap then sped up the switch.

Which print effect, caused by ink spreading as it soaks into the sheet, makes images look darker than intended?

Dot gain is worst on uncoated stock, which absorbs more ink than coated stock. Printers measure it by comparing each digital dot with the inked dot that lands on the sheet.

Which brand of dry rub-down transfer sheets, launched in 1961, let designers and punks set headlines without a printer?

Letraset suited punk's do-it-yourself spirit because it was cheap and needed no printer or publisher. Computers ended its reign, and the company moved into digital fonts.

Reid Miles designed hundreds of album covers in the 1950s and 1960s as art director of which jazz label?

Blue Note covers made Miles famous, yet he preferred classical music and gave away or sold most of the free copies he was sent.

Which rippling interference pattern, named after a watered silk fabric, can appear when a printed photograph is scanned?

Moiré arises when two fine patterns of dots or lines overlap slightly out of step, as when a scanner meets the dots of a printed picture. The French word first described rippled silk.

Designer Tibor Kalman co-created the magazine Colors in 1991 for which Italian clothing company?

Benetton funded Colors as a magazine about the rest of the world, printed in bilingual editions. Kalman's thirteen issues were later ranked among the best magazines of all time.

Which punctuation mark did adman Martin Speckter propose in 1962 for ending a surprised rhetorical question?

Interrobang joins interrogatio, Latin for a rhetorical question, to bang, printers' slang for the exclamation mark. Speckter chose the name from suggestions sent in by readers.

Which Russian artist's 1919 poster drives a red triangle into a white circle to support the Bolsheviks in the civil war?

El Lissitzky used the red wedge to stand for the Bolsheviks piercing their White opponents. The image became famous in the West after he moved to Germany in 1921, and it still turns up on album covers.

Which term for the gap between lines of type comes from the metal strips printers once slid between the rows?

Leading is said 'ledding', not 'leeding', because the strips were made of the metal lead. Slipping them between lines became popular in the eighteenth century.

Which style of type, first used by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1500, was designed to imitate handwriting?

Italic type takes its name from Italy, and it was cut for Aldus by Francesco Griffo, who later claimed the idea as his own. Its first whole volume was a small edition of Virgil made to be held in the hand.