MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
Websites developed over the course of a semester based on books chosen by students, which they adapted into web experiences as part of Harry Bloch's Screen Design course, second year of the Bachelor's degree in Visual Communication.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Rachel de Joode, Clément Lambelet
For this workshop, ECAL invited Rachel de Joode, Berlin-based artist whose practice explores the relationship between photography, sculpture, and digital images. During the week, students experimented with transforming photographic images into three-dimensional forms. Starting from simple concepts, they produced or gathered image material intended for printing and treated images as surfaces to cut, fold, layer, and assemble into sculptural objects. Through rapid tests and material experimentation, the workshop encouraged students to move repeatedly between image, surface, object, and documentation. By working with printing, scale, and spatial placement, they explored how photographic images can gain physical presence and occupy space beyond the screen.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Nicole Udry
Genius Loci, or the spirit of the place, refers to the unique identity or essence of a location. In architecture, this principle suggests that the specific characteristics of a place should be reflected and extended in a design. In the case of the second-year graphic design students, they have applied this principle to communication projects focused on promoting or extending the identity of a particular place through design. Their work likely explores how to visually capture and communicate the essence of a space, using graphic design elements that resonate with the architectural features or history of the place.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Aurèle Sack
Second-year students were required to manually develop the lowercase letters of two typefaces.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Adeline Mollard
As part of the visual identity course led by Adeline Mollard, students developed a visual identity starting from a randomly selected business card. By appropriating one of its graphic elements and its title, each project offers a unique interpretation. The identity is then expanded across a range of formats, from business cards to F4 posters, including posters, flyers, business cards, and an animated poster.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Diego Bontognali
As part of this editorial design course, students developed a research-based project focused on the selection and design of texts around a shared theme. Based on a curated set of sources, each project presents two editions with identical content, produced in both a large and a small format.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Leandra Adler, Cansu Celen, Layana Comte, Anaïs Dermont, Camille Genoud, Eve Gremaud, Eloïse Guillod, Mathis Harmant, Marie Hintzy, Matteo Lucca, Maxime Manera, Gaëtan Mauclair, Mathys Mauron, Emma Morisseau, Sara Pedersoli, Lucie Pittet, Hélène Prongué, Leonardo Mariucci, Alice Refachinho, Justine Renevey, Gaspard Schlatter, Laura Simons, Vu Toni Thien Duc, Maïa Yassin, Jonas Zesiger
In November 2025, 27 ECAL students took part in Work and Turn, a workshop led by Geoff Han exploring the theme of labor and the often overlooked work that sustains the school. Located in a former IRIL knitwear factory in the industrial area of Renens, ECAL occupies a vast building whose daily functioning depends on many visible and invisible forms of labor. Over five days, students worked in small teams to produce a collective 96-page pocket-sized publication. Each pair created an 8-page photographic visual essay focusing on a specific aspect of labor at ECAL. Rather than relying on traditional portraits, the projects explored more poetic and indirect ways of documenting traces of work through spaces, gestures, materials, and infrastructures. The entire publication was manually printed on an offset press by the students themselves, in either black or red and black. The printing process was a central part of the workshop: participants prepared the plates, set up the press, and ran the prints. This hands-on production process echoed the theme of labor explored throughout the publication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Mario Von Rickenbach
This project brings together a series of experiments created by students exploring the intersection between physical reality and immaterial imaginary worlds. Using a mixed reality headset, they transform their environment into experimental spaces where real elements become supports for digital creations.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet
By combining code, electronics, and physical prototyping, first-year students design interactive objects that react, respond, and invite interaction, gathered under the title Talk To Me. Using dialogue as playground and inspired by conversational interfaces, the projects transform physical objects into new forms of interaction.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Guy Meldem
First-year students were invited to design a 16-page publication. By experimenting with duotone through various printing techniques, they structured a dual reading experience dependent on the printed colors.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
During the editorial design course with Harry Bloch, the first-year students each laid out a chapter of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. A final edition compiling all the chapters was produced for the occasion.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Adeline Mollard
During the visual identity course, the 1st year of the Graphic Design bachelor had to carry out a poster project from a random event. They had to define their own visual system and explored a search for hand-made typographic posters. The visual identity of the event was developed through a poster and a flyer, accompanied by a research notebook grouping their entire creative process.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Robert Huber
First-year students were invited to manually sketch the typographic skeleton of lowercase alphabet letters. The objective was to maintain the proportions, curves, and characteristic axes of each letter while paying close attention to visual coherence and consistency in the drawing.
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
with Romain Collaud, Frederik Mahler-Andersen, Lara Défayes
Pixel Perfect is the semester project of the Interface Design orientation module, semester I. It invites students to put into practice the methods and principles introduced in the Macro UI and Screen Grammar courses, exploring how graphic systems structure the digital user experience. Based on the analysis of an existing website, the project encourages a critical and creative reinterpretation of its visual identity and hierarchy. The challenge is to design a contemporary, coherent and expressive interface capable of renewing the original design system while respecting its uses, content and functional constraints, as well as its key principles: consistency, modularity, and the scalability of graphic and interactive components.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
with Elric Petit
Newspaper is an industrial design project whose objective is to enable a personal stance on a topic of one’s choice. The project is based on an article taken from a newspaper or a specialized magazine, used as a conceptual and critical starting point. Through the analysis, interpretation, and translation of this written content, the project invites the development of a design reflection, questioning the issues, forms, and uses related to the chosen theme.
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
with Antonin Waterkeyn
From connected watches to large-scale billboards, digital interfaces now operate across all scales. Designing a visual identity in this context requires thinking in terms of systems that can adapt to multiple formats, uses, and rhythms. This workshop explores the creation of modular, animated identities for a fictional music label, drawing on motion design and procedural logic. Using Cavalry, students develop dynamic visual systems that transform according to precise rules, while maintaining graphic coherence and a strong relationship to the sound universe.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Beyond the screen - is a series of interactive machines developed by students in their first year of Bachelor Media & Interaction Design. These systems are inspired by the relationship between instructions and execution within a computer system. These machines create text through a modular typographic system.
FILM STUDIES
Workshop led by Michael William Farino, Jonathan Ricardo Argudo and Herbert Mayer and given to students in the Bachelor's degree programmes in Cinema and Industrial Design.
FILM STUDIES
by Noé Bregnard, Eva Rust, Victor Durand Matinella, Lou Haenggi, Samuel Harari, Hana Magimel, Nolan Grando, Mileny Viera de Andrade, Zélia Zanone
Second-year Bachelor's students attended a workshop with Belgian cinematographer Benoît Dervaux, known for his work on the Dardenne brothers' films. He was responsible for the cinematography on the Swiss films Laissez-moi by Maxime Rappaz (2023) and À bras-le-corps by Marie-Elsa Sgualdo (2025).
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
with Emily Groves, Margherita Motta
Reality Check is a hands-on course that applies the theoretical foundations of the Human Lens module through real-world qualitative research and transforming insights into concrete design proposals. Students reimagined the human experience of digital services. Engaging with real people through interviews, diary studies and other research methods, they defined and prototyped new directions for existing services that bring meaningful experience to the fore.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Simone Niquille, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
For this workshop, ECAL invited Simone C Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam whose practice investigates how digital images, computer vision, and 3D technologies shape the way bodies and objects are represented in contemporary visual culture. Through her research platform Technoflesh, Niquille examines the infrastructures behind digital imagery (from stock images and 3D assets to machine vision systems) and the cultural assumptions embedded in them. Her work reveals how datasets, rendering software, and visual standards influence how bodies, materials, and environments are modeled and understood.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Mario Von Rickenbach
The students worked on an interactive countdown in a web environment. Each day, they were tasked with creating a new sketch, culminating in their own collection, which could also be combined with projects from the entire class.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Area Of Work
The Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) Workshop is an introduction to 3D creation software that allows you to create images with photographic qualities that are not photographs. This workshop centers on the theme of “Minimal,” inviting students to explore the creative and technical foundations of contemporary CGI image-making. It emphasizes materiality and the expressive impact of reduction. Every form, light, and texture has a specific role, negative space guides the emotional tone, and fine details unify the composition.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Bruno Ceschel, Nicolas Polli, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
During Paris Photo 2025, ECAL will present a selection of its books at OFFPRINT Paris. ECAL Master Photography is pleased to present a selection of books created by its second-year students. This event offers an opportunity to engage live with the young photographers, exploring the origins of their projects and the stories behind each of these publications.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Charles Negre, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet, Tanguy Morvan
Paperboy ECAL is the result of a close collaboration between Paperboy Magazine and first-year students of the Master Photography program. Under the guidance of photographer Charles Negre , they explored the potential of everyday objects to create mysterious and playful still lives.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Maisie Cousins
The aim of this workshop, led by photographer Maisie Cousins, is to use photography as a tool to broaden our powers of observation. During the week, students explored macro photography to create miniature and abstract worlds using everyday objects and accessories. This invites us to reflect: what else are we overlooking in our immediate environment?
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Sébastien Matos
A collection of interface buttons designed and animated by first-year students of the Bachelor’s program in Media & Interaction Design. Each element includes a standard animation, an exaggerated animation, and an unexpected version. https://toggle.ecal-mid.ch/2025
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Douglas Mandry
This workshop brought together ECAL graduate artist Douglas Mandry, the Polaroid Foundation, and around thirty Bachelor Photography students. They had the exceptional opportunity to work with a camera that produces Polaroid films in a 40 × 60 cm format and weighs nearly 200 kg. This experience was made possible thanks to its operators, John Reuter and Harriet Browse, who introduced the students to the use of this unique device and the Polaroid Foundation team. Douglas Mandry provided the project’s artistic direction and supported the students in their experiments carried out directly with and on the films. The final result was presented as a collective exhibition on ECAL’s premises, revealing a particularly rich diversity of approaches and visions.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Philippe Jarrigeon
Drawing on Moncler’s Alpine heritage, its timeless style, and its technical mastery, the ECAL Bachelor Photography students developed their own interpretation of the brand’s visual language, blending documentary photography with staged scenes, and merging reality with fiction, under the artistic direction of French photographer Philippe Jarrigeon. As part of Paris Photo 2025, the students’ work was showcased at the Moncler boutique on the Champs-Élysées.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Irene Pereyra
Where does our attention go? In this workshop, first-year students become their own data researchers for 24 hours, observing when and why their phone draws focus. They track triggers, emotions, recovery time, control, context, apps used, duration, body language, energy, and inner dialogue. These everyday traces are then transformed into a one-page scrollytelling experience, a visual story of how attention moves through a day.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Talia Cotton
First-year students designed a series of audioreactive posters for a music festival. They utilized dynamic tools and live data input to explore sound-responsive visuals within social media's digital format, creating a cohesive and recognizable festival identity.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Lidia Molina González
It all started with taking a break. A pause. A moment alone in a shared space: quiet, ordinary, a little strange. Toilets might not be the first place you’d look for big ideas, but that’s why we chose them. Toilet Break uses this overlooked space to explore how we live together, take space, and connect. This first issue is about in-betweens: between public and private, inside and outside. It gathers voices from Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, across generations and practices. A place where ideas circulate freely, where serious things can be said with a wink. A collective and personal space to test new editorial forms, listen more carefully, and believe in detours as a way forward. To take, quite literally, a moment to reflect and sit with things.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Flora Hayoz
FACE À FACE is an exploration of loneliness through two mediums: dance and graphic design. This project brings together two practices to give shape to a hybrid creation. On one hand, a choreographic piece co-choreographed with Gaia Menchini, centred on states of loneliness and then captured on video. The second medium is a publication that extends the piece. By questioning the book as an object, it is designed to be read by two people and becomes a tool for dialogue and listening. The publication thus diverts from its usual uses, creating a sensory experience. The two media interact with each other, inviting us to experience solitude both in movement and in the sharing of reading. Thus, FACE À FACE offers an experience where solitude becomes the starting point for an encounter.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Paul Paturel
Grime Index is an interactive VJ-ing project that centralizes, visualizes, and enables navigation through iconic moments of grime — a chaotic genre born on London’s pirate airwaves. By turning audio data into visual identity and live signage, the project makes a performance-based, oral, and improvised culture more readable. Designed for both newcomers and longtime fans, it is built around three interchangeable modules — MC, instrumental, and lyrics — honoring the culture of sampling, MCing, and mixing. Diarization, transcription, dynamic typography, and real-time effects combine to reveal grime’s living and navigable memory.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Léa Corin
Neither Fully Free, Nor Fully Captive explores the theme of day parole. Through a video installation and a book, this project archives and documents the activities of an association dedicated to reintegration. The projection, conceived as an emotional archive, combines experimental videos with sound testimonies from individuals on day parole supported by the association, revealing the complexity of this transition. The book, as a complement, adopts a documentary and sensitive approach, blending stories and visual creations. This project transcends graphic form to foster social dialogue and shed light on an essential yet often overlooked issue.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Marc Facchinetti
The Swiss Climate Report is an editorial design project that explores climate change through data. Based on recent meteorological records, put into perspective with historical averages sometimes dating back more than 150 years, the book is supported by plugins custom-developed for InDesign. These tools translate scientific data such as temperatures, UV radiation and Dobson units into typographic variations and ASCII forms. This experimental approach offers an alternative reading of climate information. The project offers a raw and precise computer graphics perspective.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Mathilde Driebold
This book exists for what remains of us—and perhaps, of you. Fragments of an intimate past inscribed in, and lost within, a social context that goes beyond us. This diploma project takes the form of an editorial narrative, blending personal stories and social archives. Through this work, I explore the traces left by addiction within a family setting, bringing individual and collective memory into dialogue. Ce qu'il reste de nous also demonstrates that graphic design can be used as a tool to question social realities, give shape to sensitive subjects, and break the silence.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Hugo Scholl
MODULAT is a variable typeface designed around the concept of a musical visualizer. Starting from a neutral design, it branches out into multiple character sets, each allowing adaptation to different graphic and sonic worlds. Its variation axes enable it to adjust to a wide range of display formats, making it suitable for use across various digital platforms. Conceived as a modular tool, it questions how a typeface can accompany music while maintaining visual coherence. The project combines formal experimentation with a search for graphic adaptability.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Emilie Müller
It is good to believe that the library is resilient. Not as a relic of the past, but as a presence that reinvents itself, oscillating between the tangible and the intangible. It's not a question of denying the digital, nor of clinging to our yellowed pages. But to understand that if we accept the library as a moving space, an organism that mutates with the times, then its future may not be so bleak. My diploma is a non-linear immersive library, conceived as a virtual house. Each piece evokes one of six themes from the Jan Michalski Foundation's Varia collection. In the form of a web interface, the project celebrates the serendipity inherent in physical libraries, while questioning how digital technology can translate the book experience.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Eliot Dubi
At the individual level, we can neither predict nor prevent the next disaster; we can only arm ourselves with the right reflexes to face it. JUST IN CASE is a website that gathers, through four scenarios — large wildfires, dam failures, industrial accidents and earthquakes — the key actions to remember when everything turns upside down. A clear tree-like navigation, concise texts and flat-style illustrations keep learning accessible without resorting to sensationalism. A triptych of posters promotes the site to the wider public. Designed for a generation flooded with anxiety-fuelled alerts, the project turns worry into simple, immediate actions — just in case.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Coraline Beyeler
5R is a documentary book explores the contrast between urban and rural agriculture, focusing on developments driven by new generations. It addresses issues related to pollution as well as social, health, and economic challenges.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Delphine Brantschen
What Remains to Be Stitched is an interactive website shaped as a memory palace. Through her mother's oral accounts, the graphic designer weaves together Brazil's past into 3D icons and narrative fragments. No objects or images have been preserved from this life — only words. These words are my only inheritance. But what remains when even she no longer remembers them? Blending graphic design, modeling, point clouds and spatial storytelling, the project explores a poetic form of transmission, stitching memories to preserve a fragile link between memory, culture and identity.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Candice Aepli
Brindille et Azilise invite you to imagine children's space differently, by offering a lively, playful universe in their bedrooms. Here, the story is not read between the pages, but lies on the floor and climbs up the windows. It slips under an arm. It tucks in dreams. It's a whole world at children's level, where ecosystems come to life through furniture, transforming everyday life into a playground for exploration. Le jardin, collection no. 1 The gardener has slipped seeds into the soil, the bright sun warms the petals, the mouse nibbles on the sly, and in this corner full of life, everyone is busy and smiling.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Diego Steiner
Hybrid Modules explores the link between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technologies through the creation of a 3D-printed modular typographic tool for use with a manual letterpress. Designed on a grid, the modular alphabet becomes a set of physical dies, which can be inserted by hand into the press. The slow, repetitive process becomes an integral part of the visual language, making visible the time and care of the gesture. A series of A2 posters promotes a series of fictitious conferences entitled “ART, CRAFT & TECHNOLOGY - Guests in Switzerland”.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Cyprien Valenza
Patterna is an experimental variable typeface designed around two axes: Weight and Weaving. Inspired by Cassandre's Bifur from the 1930s and the arrangement of threads on Jacquard looms, Patterna is based on a rigorous grid that structures shapes and spacing. Its modular layering system allows for graphic experimentation with variations, making each composition dynamic. Numerous alternates reinforce its formal richness. Patterna challenges fashion conventions by offering a modular, dense typeface designed as both a graphic tool and a writing system.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Constance Mauler
My project explores the Club Kid scene. Born in the 1980s in New York, this movement emerged as a radical response to artistic and social elitism. Led by queer and marginalized individuals, it transformed nightlife into a space of freedom, resistance, and self-invention. This publication aim to create a dialogue between the original generation of Club Kids and the contemporary scene, to show how this movement continues to challenge norms, invent new codes, and assert liberated identities. An immersion into a flamboyant and deeply political subculture.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Alfredo Venti
Points de rencontre/Treffpunkte is an inclusive graphic system designed to make sociocultural resources more visible and accessible to people facing linguistic isolation, or to anyone seeking to join a social network. Inspired by educational tools used with non-native speakers, it combines pictograms, color coding, visual keywords, and modular signage. Installed at the entrances of community centers through interchangeable panels, and complemented by poster campaigns (print and web), it brings these structures into public view for those looking for a service, a network, or simply a welcoming place.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Amélie Bertholet
a room of our own is an editorial project born from the relationship between my flatmate, Flavia, and myself. This book explores how a relationship lives and evolves within a shared space: our apartment. Often seen as a transitional phase, cohabitation here becomes a long-term space of emancipation and sisterhood. Nurtured by feminist references—beginning with its title, borrowed from "A Room of One’s Own" by Virginia Woolf—the project questions the place of women within spaces of creation and intimacy. Through symmetry and collection, the book translates the experience of a lived space into an editorial object. The layout's grid, drawn from the apartment’s floor plan, creates shifts in scale and layout to reflect the transformation of 3D space into the 2D printed page.
PHOTOGRAPHY
by Mirielle Alina Rohr
Girls Manufactured is a series of five ceramic vases, each representing a social media–driven aesthetic identity such as the Tradwife or Femme Fatale. These identities commodify femininity through strict visual and lifestyle codes that often lean towards conservative ideals and pleasing the male gaze. The photographer generated images with AI using datasets that I tied to each identity and integrated her own face to reflect her dual role as viewer and target scrolling through social media. The images I then transferred onto the vases using a technique that merges image and clay. The vases reference femininity through containment and decoration, while their form, based on Panathenaic amphorae, once awarded to male victors in ancient Greece, links ancient symbols of patriarchy to today's curated ideals.
PHOTOGRAPHY
by Francesca Bergamini
When male desire turns into violence, it often begins with the objectification of the female body. Pretty in Pink reclaims those bodies: low-res thumbnails of 3D nude female models—created by male designers for digital porn, idealized and passive—are altered using the same 3D tools that shaped them. The curves stop seducing. They become hostile, almost threatening. 3D-printed at life-size, these figures stand like anti-monuments, exposing outdated power. Installed as a narrative path, from glossy pink columns to a white-on-white final piece, the viewer moves through stages of desire, distortion, and fear. What was once virtually consumed by the male gaze now returns with physical weight, uncensored presence, and resistance.