In 1914, working in city and commerce schools and simultaneously studying at the painting department of the Academy of Arts and the Higher Teaching Courses at the Academy, Iakov Chernikhov began to develop and implement his own method he called the "method of compositional creativity" as the basis for teaching graphic, and later also spatial disciplines.


Already in the early days of his research, he noticed that students had great difficulty learning the art of drafting through the ways of teaching that were practiced at the time. Rejecting the "method of copyism", he suggested to his students not to copy the construction, but to "build" it. Exaggerating the term "composition", which in Italian means "an essay different from what was previously known" he argued that "only by opening the student's creative abilities and by teaching them to think graphically in their own independent way, can one uncover the enormous creative abilities inherent in every person."


Developing abstract, compositional thinking on the basis of suprematist, i.e. nonfigurative constructions and combinatorial methods, he, according to his contemporaries, used to teach yesterday's peasants and workers to solve complex compositional tasks independently in six months.
With the help of specially designed "graphical exercises", Chernikhov provided the students a vast space of opportunities for exploring individual ways of approaching any task, thus providing the easiest way to study the basics of graphical art: "I managed to prove that graphical literacy can be acquired in the same way one becomes literate in general sense".


Chernikhov's penchant for handmade graphical art was based on his belief that graphical literacy is no less important than the ability to write. He was convinced that in the 20th century graphics would become the major truly international language of civilization, with his research predating by decades the emergence of the op-art and computer graphics.