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GRAPHIC DESIGN

Type Design BA2 – S2 2026

with Aurèle Sack

Second-year students were required to develop the whole alphabet for one typeface.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Visual Identity – BA2 S2 2026

with Adeline Mollard

As part of the visual identity course with Adeline Mollard, the students developed a visual identity based on a randomly drawn business card. By appropriating a graphic element and its title, each project offers a singular interpretation of it. Each proposal also involves the selection of a tool linked to the associated event (tattoo machine, sander, lithography equipment, etc.), used as a conceptual and graphic extension of the project. The identity is deployed across a range of formats, from business card to F4 size, including posters, flyers, business cards, as well as an animated poster.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Visual Identity - “?” - BA1 S2 2025-2026

with Adeline Mollard

Last year, the Marché du Temple, an iconic grocery store located in front of ECAL, closed its doors, leaving behind precious memories and a warm atmosphere that had enlivened the neighborhood for decades. This semester, students had the opportunity to reinvent this space by designing a complete visual identity for a new fictional business. Their work resulted in a poster and its animated version, a booklet, and a proposal for a new storefront. To celebrate the end of the semester, an exhibition was organized in the former premises of the Marché du Temple.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Screen Design - Flexible Event - BA1 S2 2025-2026

with Harry Bloch

As part of the Screen Design course with Harry Bloch, students freely chose an event as the starting point for their project. Using documentary, textual, and iconographic research, each student developed a digital edition conceived as an interactive and flexible poster, responsive to changes in screen format and dimensions. The project thus explores layout as a living system rather than a fixed composition. Each proposal is accompanied by conceptual and formal reflection, connecting event content with experimentation in the screen medium.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Analog Medium format workshop – 2026

with Anoush Abrar

Deconstructed Portrait The goal of this workshop, led by photographer Anoush Abrar, is to explore the meaning of the contemporary portrait.  Working with the concept of the “deconstructed portrait,” the students created an image in pairs.  The Digital Medium Format workshop week serves as an introduction to both photography equipment and specialized software.

FILM STUDIES

Morgane Beslay – Le Mur (Directing)

by Morgane Beslay

Following their difficult separation, Eliane and Laure have to repaint a wall of the house they are leaving, a wall as full of their own history as that of others before them.

FILM STUDIES

Nafi Touré – Le Mur (Photography)

by Nafi Touré

Following their difficult separation, Eliane and Laure have to repaint a wall of the house they are leaving, a wall as full of their own history as that of others before them.

FILM STUDIES

Maéna Hirt – Pauvre Pauvre Timothy

by Maéna Hirt

Timothy disappears. Then Astride's friends vanish, and soon the entire town seems to fade away without explanation.

FILM STUDIES

Robin Kaufmann – Sous ma peau

by Robin Kaufmann

The night Gabriel celebrates his abuser’s conviction, he is confronted with Lucien’s tenderness.

FILM STUDIES

Charlyne Genoud – Respirer une fois sur trois

by Charlyne Genoud

In group strength-training classes, people breathe in unison every day. Charlyne lifts weights alongside three retired women who love to sing. What if a cheerful gym could be the place to break our family curses?

FILM STUDIES

Jann Kessler – se métamorphoser ?

by Jann Kessler

How do I build healthy, equal relationships? An intimate cinematic-therapeutic journey of discovery.

FILM STUDIES

Floriane Roulin – Petites Bouées

by Floriane Roulin

During their father’s wedding preparations, Sophie and Mila are confronted with their childhood memories.

FILM STUDIES

Mathys Nouspikel – Capriccio

by Mathys Nouspikel

Arsène runs away before playing for his dying grandfather, but an unexpected encounter helps him find the courage to return.

FILM STUDIES

Pauline Pichard – GLORYLAND

by Pauline Pichard

Last spring, unknown lights appeared in the sky above Lausanne. In a garden, the last fragment of an ordinary Eden, tales blur with rumours after a series of strange disappearances.

Design Research for Digital Innovation (EPFL+ECAL Lab)

Côme Brocas – MountResilience

by Côme Brocas

How can we facilitate dialogue, engagement, and decision-making in response to the challenges of water management and climate change in mountain regions? This replicable demonstrator from the European project MountResilience is the result of participatory and interdisciplinary research conducted in the heart of the Valais Alps. The web application brings together experts and the general public around three interconnected sections: relative indicators provide a shared overview of the situation in real time, participatory field observations foster engagement, and a catalog raises awareness of local solutions. The evaluative study of the tool identified several factors influencing engagement in the design of climate change adaptation solutions.

Design Research for Digital Innovation (EPFL+ECAL Lab)

Sofia Lelis – Èvokâ II

by Sofia Lelis

Èvokâ II is an interactive installation that invites visitors to the Cantonal and University Library of Fribourg to enter into dialogue with the archives. Through an AI-based conversational interface, a presence living within the collections gathers memories connected to the canton and, in return, reveals fragments, stories and traces of Fribourg's heritage. This design research project explores how digital archives can become more accessible and resonant, questioning what connects us to a collective identity: places, emotions, stories and lived memories. Developed with the Swiss Data Science Center and supported by the Swiss National Library, Èvokâ II transforms archival consultation into an intimate experience, between personal memory and shared history.

Design Research for Digital Innovation (EPFL+ECAL Lab)

Zeynep Erol – SWITCH – Sofra

by Zeynep Erol

Sofra is a culturally adaptive conversational agent that supports dietary behaviour change by understanding how people relate to food. Developed within the EU SWITCH project, it builds a personal food culture from photos, mind maps, and voice notes that users provide to represent their everyday practices, motivations, and heritage. This profile shapes the agent's tone and suggestions, moving guidance from generic to grounded in each person's context. Developed through three user studies, the project shows how cultural resonance makes dietary support more relevant, respectful, and engaging. Combining interaction design and AI prompt engineering, Sofra challenges universal approaches to health technology and advocates for systems that adapt to, rather than flatten, cultural differences.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Vittorio Franzolini – Still still

by Vittorio Franzolini

Still still investigates the legacy of Fascist-era architecture in Italy. Inspired by Futurist "parole in libertà", the title stems from the repetition of the same word, generating an ambiguity between stillness and movement. Produced between Milan and Rome using analogue photography, the project seeks to desacralize these buildings through close and displaced viewpoints, moving away from their monumental and celebratory representation. Walls and surfaces appear like skin marked by erosion, dust and traces of time, transforming symbols of power into fragile and vulnerable bodies. Still still reflects on the persistence of certain aesthetics of authority in the present and takes the form of a book and an installation printed in Comcolor.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Lee Eggenschwiler – Standard Values

by Lee Eggenschwiler

Standard Values explores the opaque economy of colored gemstones in Bangkok. Conceived as a visual investigation, this project focuses on the gray areas of this industry, capturing the precise moment when trust mechanisms and global flows transform a simple stone into a standardized ideal of luxury. The book confronts the raw materiality of the gems with the urban space, creating a dialogue between the facets of the crystals and the architecture of the skyscrapers to reveal their similarities and inclusions. Yet, the images also reveal a sense of solitude within an illusory opulence, moving between empty shops and anonymous bodies.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Rose Graf – EVERYTHING FALLS QUIET

by Rose Graf

There are moments no one sees. Not because they don't exist, but because no one ever really looks. EVERYTHING FALLS QUIET grew from an intimate memory, one of school bullying. Familiar places swallowed by an unnatural darkness, bodies sharing space without ever truly meeting, a tension that lingers without breaking. Between recollection and fiction, between the real and the dreamlike. A way of taking back what was once taken. Of holding still these invisible moments, and finally giving them a face.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Léa Isoard – Almost Marble

by Léa Isoard

Almost Marble examines the circulation of contemporary female bodies within a visual and cultural landscape shaped by inherited representations. Using the Caryatids of the Acropolis as a reference, the project explores the persistence of ideals constructed through a masculine gaze, as well as the possibilities for their displacement. Within the Athenian labyrinth, portraits and architectural fragments come together to form a sensitive reading of a stratified city. The photographed figures can be understood as "displaced Caryatids": no longer bodies assigned to support a monument, but living presences that inhabit the city and constitute it from within.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Farah Mirzayeva – ANOMALIES

by Farah Mirzayeva

Inspired by a background in chemistry, ANOMALIES explores the boundary between scientific imagery and visual construction. After photographing machines which process or store data in EPFL laboratories, the images are modified by using scanning as a tool of transformation, to alter, glitch and deform. The process mimics the machines themselves: the codified images are systematically rescanned to gain new materiality, they become textured, unstable, and paradoxically analogue. The installation recreates the skeleton of a microscope seen in a laboratory, becoming a modular photographic sculpture of metal. A book completes this project: through sequencing, zooms and accumulation, it mirrors data processing in order to reveal the immateriality and abstraction of scientific research.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Ashley Schneiter – AMUL RAGAL

by Ashley Schneiter

AMUL RAGAL is a documentary photographic project dedicated to lamb, a practice deeply rooted in Senegal's cultural, social, and spiritual traditions. Through this work, the artist questions the photographic representation of the Black male body and the imaginaries associated with it. Senegalese wrestling offers a field where rituals, beliefs, and contemporary culture intersect. As a woman working in an almost exclusively male environment, the artist developed a gaze sensitive to the gestures, nuances, moments of waiting, and vulnerability that escape the spectacle. The use of a shallow depth of field turns blur into a narrative tool, conveying the uncertain boundary between reality, belief, and representation.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Shiny Vallenas – The Money Shot Always Tastes Like Bunnies And Donuts

by Shiny Vallenas

The codes of pornography have profoundly reshaped the representation of women within contemporary imagery. From the porno chic aesthetic of the 2000s to the clean girl aesthetic that dominates social media today, the same close-ups and fragmented bodies continue to circulate. Desire, being inherent to the image itself, now takes on disguised forms in response to censorship, transforming into viral trends. This project combines staged photography and AI-generated imagery to reconstruct visual dispositifs drawn from porn casting videos, OnlyFans, and the language of advertising. By tracing formal correspondences between the body, the animal, and processes of objectification, it seeks to make visible what a continuous flow of images has taught us to stop seeing.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Salomé Billato – Grosse

by Salomé Billato

Grosse is a photographic book that combines self-portraits, documentary images, and fictional images exploring the contemporary body. By reclaiming the word "grosse", a term marked by shame and stigma, this project questions beauty standards and their hold over our relationship to the body. It draws on the artist's personal experience with Wegovy, a weight-loss treatment that intensified constant monitoring of her body. Grosse explores a central contradiction: the criticism of these norms while participating in them. The book questions how far we are willing to reshape our bodies in order to conform to socially constructed ideals.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Colas Ravey – Un goût salé m'est resté en bouche

by Colas Ravey

The beach, in video games as in real life, is a place dear to the artist. It is a space where people, sensations, and moments of life intertwine. A place where people's identities and sexuality are at the mercy of the sun and the heat. Un goût salé m'est resté en bouche is a reminiscence of childhood, a time when video games were pixelated worlds where anything seemed possible, free from questions about self-image and love. Drawing inspiration from low-poly aesthetics, the project evokes a suspended moment where voyeurism, sunbathing, and flirting coexist. A moment where the artist becomes the avatar of a multi-purpose game, navigating between desire and freedom, intimate and public, in a quest for something that might be love.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Antoine Genoud – Galé j'armayi

by Antoine Genoud

Galé j'armayi explores how the figure of the peasant is represented in Switzerland, where it is deeply intertwined with national identity. More broadly, the project invites viewers to question their relationship to an idealized and exploited past, as well as to the traditions to which they are attached, in order to reclaim them. Visually, this takes the form of a video piece and a series of self-portraits where pose, clothing, and objects combine to recreate traditional peasant imagery while introducing a certain dissonance in order to challenge it. Furthermore, the roles of men and women are played by the artist himself, questioning certain notions of gender and traditional, conservative values.

PRODUCT DESIGN

ECAL AT THE FESTIVAL DES CABANES, VILLA MÉDICIS, ROME

with Camille Blin

For the 2026 Festival des Cabanes at the Villa Medici in Rome, students from the Master in Product Design were invited to develop a project related to the Villa's garden, in collaboration with the renowned Italian ceramics manufacturer Mutina. The Villa's gardens offer a rich historical and spatial context, conducive to exploring aesthetics, function, and interaction with visitors. Students had access to the entire Mutina catalogue (tiles, bricks, and other materials) to build their installations. The project was selected and mentored by the French designer Ronan Bouroullec, ECAL, Villa Medici and Mutina.

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Ethical, Accessible and Mindful Design

with Irene Pereyra

Ethical, Accessible & Mindful Design is a one-week module that trains students to examine the ethical dimensions of design decisions. Through practice, students learn to design experiences that are inclusive, transparent, and considerate of their broader social impact. This semester, the module took low-vision accessibility as its central design constraint. Working under the brief Goodbye to All …, students were asked to guide a user through a permanent, irreversible, and non-negotiable farewell. Beyond WCAG compliance, the exercise required sustained attention to contrast across all interface states, legible typography, keyboard-only navigation, focus visibility, and layout integrity at both 100% and 300% zoom, without loss of hierarchy or readability.

The Mechanics of Cinema in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

with Benoit Rossel

This research project by the Film Department at ECAL aims to assess the impact of artificial intelligence on cinema and film education.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

A Story for a Shape – Workshop avec Mélanie Courtinat

with Mélanie Courtinat

Ce workshop explore la paréidolie, notre capacité à projeter du sens et des émotions sur des formes abstraites. À partir d'une primitive géométrique (cube, sphère, cône...), matrice fondamentale de tout univers numérique, les étudiant·e·s en binômes doivent concevoir une expérience en réalité virtuelle. En s'appuyant sur une synchronisation précise entre l'espace physique et un environnement Unreal Engine, le projet transforme ces objets fixes en supports narratifs.