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50 free Design trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which architect founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1919?
Walter Gropius
The school moved to Dessau and then Berlin, and its last director, Mies van der Rohe, closed it in 1933 under Nazi pressure.
Q 02Which city's 'White City' has the world's highest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings?
Tel Aviv
Many Jewish Bauhaus architects emigrated there in the 1930s after the school was closed.
Q 03The Swiss sans-serif released in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann was originally called what?
Neue Haas Grotesk
It was renamed in 1960 after the Latin word for Swiss, to trade on Switzerland's reputation for ultra-modern graphic design.
Q 04Dieter Rams, longtime head of design at Braun, is known for which three-word motto?
Less, but better
He also said that 'indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.'
Q 05Rams's 1956 Braun SK 4 radiogram earned what macabre nickname for its clear acrylic lid?
Snow White's coffin
It broke with the tradition of hiding electronics inside furniture-style cabinets. Apple's iOS calculator later paid tribute to his ET66 calculator.
Q 06Charles Eames wanted his 1956 lounge chair to have 'the warm, receptive look' of what?
A well-used first baseman's mitt
Ray Eames thought the prototype looked 'comfortable and un-designy'. It was the first Eames chair aimed at the high-end market.
Q 07Which American company has manufactured the Eames Lounge Chair since it launched in 1956?
Herman Miller
The chair debuted on Arlene Francis's daytime TV show Home. Knoll makes the Barcelona chair; Vitra makes the Panton.
Q 08How much was Portland State student Carolyn Davidson paid for designing the Nike Swoosh in 1971?
$35
Phil Knight's first reaction was 'I don't love it, but maybe it will grow on me.' In 1983 he gave her a diamond Swoosh ring and 500 shares of stock.
Q 09The 1915 Coca-Cola contour bottle's shape was based on a picture of what?
A cocoa pod
Earl R. Dean of the Root Glass Company found the picture in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The brief demanded a bottle recognisable by touch in the dark.
Q 10Who designed the first schematic London Tube map in 1931?
Harry Beck
He was paid ten guineas for the card edition and five for the poster. Colleagues compared it to an electrical circuit diagram, though he said that was not his inspiration.
Q 11Why did the Tube map's designer decide the stations' real geographic positions didn't matter?
Passengers underground only need to know the route topology
He produced a joke version with electrical symbols and a 'Bakerlite' line. The Underground was sceptical of the unpaid spare-time project until it proved instantly popular in 1933.
Q 12What was 3M's Spencer Silver trying to make in 1968 when he stumbled on the Post-it adhesive?
A super-strong glue
He spent five years pitching his 'solution without a problem' before colleague Art Fry used it to anchor a bookmark in his hymn book.
Q 13Why were the original Post-it notes canary yellow?
Q 21Paul Rand created logos for IBM, UPS, ABC and which Steve Jobs computer company?
NeXT
Rand was one of the first American designers to embrace the Swiss Style and taught at Yale for decades.
Q 22Saul Bass designed the animated paper cut-out arm for the titles of which 1955 Otto Preminger film?
The Man with the Golden Arm
He also did North by Northwest and Psycho for Hitchcock, and the AT&T globe and Hanna-Barbera 'swirling star' logos.
Q 23Milton Glaser sketched the 'I ❤ NY' logo in 1976 in what unlikely place?
The back of a taxi
He drew it in red crayon on scrap paper. The original is now in the Museum of Modern Art, and the letters are set in American Typewriter.
It was the colour of scrap paper in the lab next door
Post-its launched across the US in 1980 after a free-sample blitz in Boise, Idaho, where 90 percent of recipients said they would buy them.
Q 14The Barcelona chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for whom?
Spanish royalty at the 1929 International Exposition
Its shape is thought to derive from the Roman curule chair. Knoll did not even name it 'Barcelona' until 1987.
Q 15George Carwardine designed the Anglepoise lamp in 1932 after working on what?
Vehicle suspension systems
Contrary to popular claims, he said the mechanism had nothing to do with imitating the human arm. Herbert Terry and Sons took over manufacturing in 1934.
Q 16Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel Wassily chair, designed at the Bauhaus in 1925–26, was inspired by what?
Bicycle construction
Despite the name, it was not made for Wassily Kandinsky; he simply admired it and Breuer built him a duplicate. The name came decades later from Italian maker Gavina.
Q 17The Vespa scooter's name is Italian for what?
Wasp
Aeronautical engineer Corradino D'Ascanio, who hated motorcycles, redesigned Piaggio's 'Donald Duck' prototype into the 1946 Vespa.
Q 18Which 1952 film, with Audrey Hepburn riding side-saddle behind Gregory Peck, is credited with selling 100,000 Vespas?
Roman Holiday
John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Dean Martin were all owners by 1956.
Q 19Consumer Swiss Army knives from Victorinox and Wenger can be told apart by what?
The shape around the cross logo
Victorinox uses a shield around the cross; Wenger used a rounded square. The two firms supplied about 50,000 knives a year to the Swiss military.
Q 20The IKEA Billy bookcase was designed in 1979 by Gillis Lundgren, who first sketched it where?
On the back of a napkin
Lundgren was IKEA's fourth employee. More than 140 million Billys have been sold, enough that economists use its price as an index.
Q 24Vincent Connare made Comic Sans in 1994 after seeing which serif face in Microsoft Bob?
Times New Roman
He felt the serif type made the cartoon dog look far too formal. The 'Ban Comic Sans' campaign began in 1999.
Q 25Which serif typeface was commissioned by a British newspaper in 1931 and debuted in 1932?
Times New Roman
Stanley Morison of Monotype and lettering artist Victor Lardent based it on the older face Plantin. It debuted in print on 3 October 1932.
Q 26Which British designer led Apple's iMac and iPhone design and left in 2019 to found LoveFrom?
Jony Ive
He joined Apple in 1992 and worked closely with Steve Jobs after Jobs's return. He has been chancellor of the Royal College of Art since 2017.
Q 27Raymond Loewy, designer of the Shell logo and Lucky Strike pack, also designed the livery of which aircraft?
Air Force One
He also styled the Studebaker Avanti, Coca-Cola vending machines and Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives, and appeared on the cover of Time in 1949.
Q 28Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif lemon squeezer for Alessi was inspired by the shape of what?
A squid
He sketched it on a napkin while eating calamari and squeezing lemon over it. Alessi's president called the product 'a big joke'.
Q 29Which Italian designer founded the postmodern Memphis Group in 1980?
Ettore Sottsass
Its colourful laminate-and-terrazzo look defined the mid-1980s and was later succeeded by the Y2K aesthetic.
Q 30Alvar and Aino Aalto's wavy 1936 glass vase takes its common name from which Helsinki establishment?
The Savoy restaurant
Its design was inspired by the leather breeches of a Sami woman, and early prototypes were blown inside a ring of wooden sticks.