Test your design intuition with this short exercise.
(Image credit: yU+co)
Do colours match shapes? According to Wassily Kandinsky, the two go hand in hand. The Russian painter, art theorist, and Bauhaus teacher put his theory to the test with an exercise for his students, which you can now complete online. Do your answers align with the ideas of the Bauhaus master?
If you're not familiar with Kandinsky, he was an authority on colour theory even before joining Bauhaus thanks to his book, On the Spiritual in Art. In it, he establishes distinct emotional and spiritual associations between specific colours and forms. To communicate the relationship between colour and shapes, he created an assignment for his students.
Now, thanks to an online exhibit created in created in partnership with digital innovation studio yU+co and the Getty Research Institute, you can take Kandinsky's test.
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Named the Kandinsky Form and Color Exercise, this simple drag and drop quiz challenges you to match a primary colour with its corresponding shape, including a triangle, circle and square. Take the quiz right now by clicking here.
Artist Erich Mrozek made these colour studies based on Kandinsky’s ideas (Image credit: yU+co)
Once you finish the quiz you'll be shown if you match Kandinsky's theory. You'll also find an explanation of why a certain colour can be matched to a particular shape.
"The results of Kandinsky's survey seemed to prove his argument," the results page explains, "as the majority of respondents answered according to his model".
The exercise is part of the interactive online exhibition Bauhaus: Building The New Artist, which celebrates 100 years of the famous school through various interactive activities.
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"The desire of museums and cultural institutions to engage the public in new ways is the perfect opportunity to combine new technologies with our experience in storytelling in order to create something groundbreaking and enriching," says Garson Yu, founder and creative director of yU+co.
Dom Carter is a freelance writer who specialises in art and design. Formerly a staff writer for Creative Bloq, his work has also appeared on Creative Boom and in the pages of ImagineFX, Computer Arts, 3D World, and .net. He has been a D&AD New Blood judge, and has a particular interest in picture books.
