49 Fun Facts About Graphic Design

Helvetica was originally released in 1957 under what name?

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.

The name 'Helvetica' is Latin for what?

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.

Which of these is a hallmark of the Swiss or International Typographic Style?

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.

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

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.

The serif face Stanley Morison created for a newspaper in 1931 took its name from which paper?

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.

Gill Sans (1928) grew out of Edward Johnston's corporate typeface for which organisation?

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.

Garamond typefaces are named after a Parisian engraver of which century?

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.

Adobe's 1989 typeface by Carol Twombly, ubiquitous on film posters, is based on the inscription on what?

Trajan's Column in Rome, dedicated in AD 113, carries the inscription whose Roman square capitals Carol Twombly traced for her 1989 typeface Trajan.

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 inspired by Watchmen and 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, from the French 'carne', a projecting angle.

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

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.

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 rather than a text face.

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

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.

Saul 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 (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.

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

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.

Where did Milton Glaser sketch the I Love New York logo in 1976?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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, created in 1885 by bookkeeper Frank Mason Robinson, uses which handwriting style?

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.

Susan Kare drew the first Macintosh icons on what?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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; a sociology graduate who taught high school, he art-directed Beach Culture before Ray Gun launched in 1992.

Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster was based on a photograph taken by whom?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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, including the Musica Viva series of pure typographic grids; he later wrote Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981).

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

Renault car bodies were what Pierre Bezier modelled with the curves in the 1960s for its UNISURF CAD system; Paul de Casteljau at Citroën had found the same mathematics in 1959, but his work stayed unpublished for decades.

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 had left Xerox PARC after its Interpress language stalled; PostScript, released in 1984, drove the LaserWriter printer in 1985.

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

PageMaker, released by Aldus in July 1985, let users lay out pages on screen and print them through PostScript; Aldus founder Paul Brainerd coined the term desktop publishing.

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.

Since which year has the Pantone Color Institute named a Color of the Year?

2000 was the first Color of the Year, Cerulean Blue, chosen in December 1999; the programme came decades after Lawrence Herbert bought the firm's technology in 1962 for $50,000 and renamed it Pantone.

Where is Pantone headquartered?

Carlstadt, New Jersey, a few miles west of Manhattan, is Pantone's home; the Levine brothers' Manhattan print shop hired Herbert part-time in 1956, and X-Rite bought the company in 2007.

Who developed movable metal type in Mainz in the mid-15th century, transforming graphic communication?

Johannes Gutenberg cast individual metal letters in Mainz and printed his 42-line Bible around 1455; the Chinese artisan Bi Sheng had made ceramic movable type around 1040, four centuries earlier.

Adobe Illustrator, released in 1987, was originally developed for which computer?

Apple Macintosh users got Illustrator in 1987 as a drawing front end for PostScript; the company had built its Bezier tools in-house for font design and turned them into a product, with a Windows version following in 1989.

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

The Public Theater hired Paula Scher in 1994, after George C. Wolfe became its producer, and her crowded condensed wood-type letters in black and white became the model for the street-poster look of theatre branding.

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

Kenneth Grange, the industrial designer behind the Kenwood Chef mixer and the nose of British Rail's InterCity 125, was one of Pentagram's five founding partners in 1972 alongside Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes and Mervyn Kurlansky.

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

Munich 1972 had Aicher as chief designer, with a rainbow palette, Univers typography and stick-figure pictograms; he had co-founded the Ulm School of Design with Max Bill and his wife Inge Scholl, sister of the White Rose's Hans and Sophie.

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

Otto Neurath devised the method in the 1920s at Vienna's Social and Economic Museum, with woodcut artist Gerd Arntz drawing its standardised symbols; the name Isotype was adopted after the team moved to The Hague 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 under editor Carmel Snow, and over 24 years his spreads shaped Richard Avedon and Irving Penn; he had first won notice in 1924 Paris with a Le Bal Banal poster placed ahead of Picasso's.

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

Wolff Olins, founded in London in 1965 by Michael Wolff and Wally Olins, unveiled the jagged 2012 mark in 2007 to wide derision; the agency also created identities for Orange, Tata Group and the Unilever U.

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

Ken Garland wrote the manifesto in late 1963 and published it in 1964 with 21 co-signatories, urging designers to turn from advertising trivia to useful work; Emigre issue 51 republished an updated version in 1999.