Simple shapes - square, circle, triangle - are with us everywhere. These are the most basic shapes on Earth.
The notable books that explored this were Italian artist Bruno Munari's series which started with The Discovery of the Circle. He writes: “The first thing a child draws looks like a circle. People spontaneously arrange themselves in a circle when they need to observe something close up, and this led to the origin of the arena, the circus, and the stock exchange trading posts.”
Munari wrote over 60 books and covered the each basic shape in its own book. For example in Square, he writes: "As tall and as broad as a man with his arms outstretched, the square has always been used, from the oldest writings and rock engravings made by early man, to signify the idea of an enclosure, a house, a village. Enigmatic in its simplicity, in the monotonous repetition of its four sides, its four identical corners, it can generate a whole series of interesting figures".
Kurt Vonnegut's rejected master's thesis was a visual presentation titled "The Shapes of Stories". The article is HERE. Below is Maya Eilam's version of his thesis:
