PHOTOGRAPHY
with Julien Bourdeille
Événement Lumineux Through an in-depth exploration of light as a narrative and sensory medium, first-year students created a short film on the theme “Luminous Event.” This project allows them to learn how to manage a complete audiovisual project while mastering the tools of filming, framing, and camera movement.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
“What is clearly conceived can be clearly expressed, and the words to say it come easily.” Nicholas Boileau, *L’art poétique*. As students embark on their final year of study at ECAL, with their interests and methods taking shape, this final project offers an opportunity to challenge their own rules, established practices and influences, to refuse to settle for the status quo and to take risks.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Nicolas Poillot
By conceptualizing and producing visual content as part of an editorial series, students will explore the concept of applied photography in a practical, creative, and professional manner, working closely with Art Director Nicolas Poillot.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Maxime Guyon
This semester, students will explore how reflective surfaces transform our relationship to image and object. They become thresholds: what the object shows sometimes matters less than what its reflection reveals. Like a photosensitive material, they capture and replay the world, even embodying a form of technological and consumerist sterilization. Mirror-objects disrupt perception: as simulacra, they distort, double, multiply, or elude like a trompe-l’œil. They question what lies beyond the frame, showing what the object “sees” rather than what it is, and can become a space for self-reflection a mirror of their creator sometimes even fostering a narcissistic dimension.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Abracadabra! Starting with projects centered on a common theme, students develop their own in-depth work exploring the concept of “magic” in photography. They create a project that explores the relationship between reality and the imagination, using photography as a tool for revealing, transforming, and interpreting reality.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Calypso Mahieu
Le temps des Fleurs This course, which is both practical and technical, requires students to develop a true photographer’s eye. Its goal is to introduce students to, or help them refine their skills in various photographic genres, such as still life, portraiture, and architecture, as well as documentary and staged photography. These disciplines demand particular attention and great precision in the selection of models, locations, and objects. Mastery of composition, framing, and the management of light, whether natural or artificial, is essential for a successful shot. Throughout the course, students are guided to refine their observational skills and their ability to create images that are both precise and expressive.
with Jamy Herrmann, Achille Masson, Julien Gurtner, Vincent Jacquier
From March 16 to 20, ECAL is taking part in Digital Cleanup Week, a worldwide event dedicated to raising awareness and taking action for a more responsible digital world. A week to repair, recycle, clean and think!
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
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.
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 Mazaccio & Drowilal
The purpose of this class is to examine the relationships between photography — in a context shaped by the digital — and its various modes of display. Students will have to consider what a photograph may be materially and explore how an image’s meaning is derived from both the mode of its distribution and the material form that it assumes. Although the final outcome has to include photography in a third dimensional way ( installation ), projects may use and combine image-based practices such as digital photography, collage, CGI, projection, printmaking, sculpture, objects, or performance, to encourage an expanded approach to photographic practice. The idea is to challenge the different types of engagement possible with pictures today.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Elisa Medde
This module assists the students to develop into a finalized work a project that further expands their interests and research. The module gives the opportunity to take some of the ideas, skills and themes explores in the first semester and make into a brand new work that can take any possible form: a book, an installation, an online project, a performance.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Marco De Mutiis
The course, tutored by Marco De Mutiis, explored how emotions are being exploited and transformed by social media practices and aesthetics (e.g. influencer photography and CGI, operational beauty and weaponized cuteness), as well as through recent image technologies (e.g. generative AI platforms and text-to-image services).
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Clothilde Morette
The course explores the history of photography and related media through an approach that dissolves boundaries between academic and popular culture, and between photography and other artistic practices. Drawing on references from science, science fiction, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, students engage with a broad history of images from the early twentieth century to today. Based on key exhibitions of the Independent Group, the course introduces open themes such as technology, motion, and imagined worlds. Through research, appropriation, and the development of a mind-map accompanied by a theoretical text, students are encouraged to build connections across disciplines and reflect on the conceptual and narrative dimensions of their practice.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Charles Negre, Milo Keller
The course focuses on developing the ability to respond to a commission within one’s own artistic practice, through an introduction to studio photography and constructed image-making. With an emphasis on still life, students refine their sensitivity to photographing and interpreting objects. Assignments revolve around transforming everyday objects into objects of desire, using the tools of commercial and product photography. Through styling, lighting, and visual storytelling, students explore how to reframe the ordinary as something compelling, working across both traditional and improvised studio setups.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Milo Keller
The course is a platform for the development of personal projects that arise from the desire and curiosity of each student. The basic concept of the work must be relevant to the field of contemporary photographic images. Each project can take a different form depending on the specificities, contents and inclinations of each participant. From books to multimedia installations, from performance to CGI, group discussions will articulate a plural vision of photography’s applications today.
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 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.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Nicolas Poillot
In September 2024, the start of the academic year at ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne, was highlighted by the beginning of our collaboration with trail equipment manufacturer Nnormal. At the same time, not far from our university, Kilian Jornet, the founder of the brand, gave our teams a taste for exploits by linking 82 peaks in the Alps over 4,000 meters high, shattering all records in the process. In trail running, as in photography, you need passion, discipline and endurance. Our Bachelor Photography students at ECAL are not all great sportsmen and women, but they are driven by the desire to achieve visual exploits. Trained in technical mastery, conceptual development and risk-taking, they spent three years in a field of exploration that allows them to seek out limits and chart their path. It's essential for them to get off the beaten track and find a visual language that sets them apart from the vast quantity of images that overwhelm us. ECAL has a long tradition of collaborating with top-level brands and professionals who, in addition to their own activities, wish to pass on their skills and experience to a passionate young generation looking for guidance in unfamiliar territory. Among them is Régis Tosetti, artistic director of Nnormal, who has a strong link with ECAL, where he trained for a degree in Visual Communication in 2005. Régis kicked off this collaboration with head coach Nicolas Poillot, also an art director. Nicolas forged his raw and elegant style by taking fashion towards the documentary. A guest lecturer at ECAL for several years, he has guided students tirelessly, with pragmatism and rigor, through the mapping of the brand and its visual expression. In a polluted, noisy world, saturated with superimposed stimuli, it is difficult to concentrate, to focus on a clear objective, a goal to look forward to. The opportunity offered by the collaboration between ECAL and Nnormal has encouraged a young generation of photographers to turn to the mountains. Nature is a terrain of escape, communion and adventure for an essential imagination made up of bodies and landscape. The main subject is the mediating element between these two components, the shoes that allow us to go further in this union. But there's much more than shoes in the work of Nicolas and his students: there are values of ecology, dry and wet atmospheres, solar and nocturnal lights, technical and organic textures, muscles and tense faces that achieve deliverance through their exploits. And finally, in trail running as in photography, despite sood technical and mental preparation and systematic study of the forecasts, there are unforeseen circumstances that force us to come up with improvised solutions that reveal new forms of beauty.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Florence Tétier, Nicolas Coulomb
"Le Mâle" - 30th anniversary In 2025, "Le Mâle" will celebrate its 30th anniversary. With this in mind, students have been working on the brand's fragrance. Reflections on masculinity and different representations of the body in 2025.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
with Stéphane Halmaï-Voisard
The Broomstick Variation project proposes to revisit a basic construction principle (sticks, visible joints, modular structure) and explore its potential for generating new objects and pieces of furniture suited to contemporary uses. The aim is to understand how this design logic, conceived as accessible and economical, can be updated in response to the challenges of sustainability, functionality, and aesthetics.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Steve Bouillant, Teo Grajqevci, Yann Müller
Data has the power to reshape the way we interpret the world. Starting from a simple question or hypothesis, this project explores how visualization can reveal patterns that are not immediately visible. The result is a fully functional data visualization experience with an interactive interface, including a mobile controller that allows users to manipulate the display in real time. Designed and programmed by second-year Bachelor students in Media & Interaction Design as part of a course taught by Gaël Hugo, the project demonstrates how interactive visualization can make complex data more accessible and engaging.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet
Second-year Interaction Design students imagined and prototyped a mobile application exploring the theme “Much Faster / Much Slower.” The project examines our fascination with speed and slowness in digital interfaces, and how technology shapes our perception of time, attention, and communication. Building on this tension, students developed app concepts that propose alternative ways of communicating, consuming, or creating content, where rhythm becomes a central element of interaction design. Each project takes the form of an interactive prototype, offering a distinctive and sometimes deliberately non-immediate experience that questions our everyday digital habits.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
with David Glättli
Founded in 1981, micasa has built its reputation on accessible, high-quality design and has grown into Switzerland’s leading furniture brand. Committed to democratic design that integrates seamlessly into everyday life, the company partnered with ECAL to develop HOMEWORKS, a limited-edition collection that invites a new generation to reconsider how living spaces are shaped and how design can become an active, meaningful presence in daily routines.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
First-year students designed visual identities for fictional museums. As part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto, this project led them to create graphic universes that that express the character of each imaginary exhibition site.
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 Robert Huber
Designing a logotype means defining a strong visual identity anchored in a specific context. First-year Graphic Design students developed a hand-drawn logotype based on a subject, theme, or environment of their own choosing. This creation was informed by prior research in typographic archives. Each student produced a reference booklet and a specimen system based on six or more typefaces, to ground their visual and conceptual exploration. Balancing typographic culture and contemporary expression, each project investigates what makes a visual identity truly distinctive.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
During the information design course the students of the second year have been asked to design a cartographic poster based on a film in the road movie genre, in a direct or abstract representation.
FILM STUDIES
with Alessandro Comodin
The 2025 documentary film workshop for 2nd year students was lead by french italian director Alessandro Comodin.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet
Fictional mobile apps based on the "Show more / Show less" theme, offering new ways of consulting, communicating, creating, playing, discovering and learning. Students in their 2nd year of Bachelor Media & Interaction Design designed a dedicated experience and graphic interface via interactive prototypes on Figma.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Aurèle Sack
The second-year students had to vectorize a typeface they had drawn last semester.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Diego Bontognali
Development of an editorial system deployed across three publication formats, centered on the theme of prohibition.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
with Christophe Guberan
In collaboration with a local craftsman, the students designed a reusable packaging solution suitable for production in a little series. The project aimed to enhance the value of an everyday food product while addressing current challenges related to transport, sustainability, and the second life of packaging. The intervention had to be simple, functional, and eco-friendly, offering a purpose beyond its original packaging function.
FILM STUDIES
with Benoit Rossel
The 2025 documentary film workshop for 1st year students was lead by french swiss director Benoit Rossel.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
with Elric Petit
As part of the CITY TREES project, students were invited to design an object in connection with a tree of their choice within the urban landscape of Lausanne. Drawing inspiration from dendrology, they observed an existing tree and envisioned a subtle, respectful, and reversible intervention. The aim was to highlight the unique characteristics of the tree while ensuring the project harmoniously blended into its surroundings.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Documenteur – The Power of the Fake Based on projects developed around a common theme, students create a personal and in-depth body of work exploring the notion of deception. They build a project that plays with the boundaries of photographic truth, using the medium as an artifice of lies.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Maxime Guyon
OBI: Object Brochure Investigation More than just a store, OBI has become an integral part of local history. This Renens landmark also maintains a close link with ECAL, serving as a landmark and source of inspiration for its students. In fact, there is an architectural filiation between the two: Jean Tschumi's son, Bernard Tschumi, is the architect who designed the ECAL's renovation. This generational dialogue further strengthens OBI's place in students' visual and creative imaginations. OBI embodies the spirit of “Do It Yourself” (DIY), a concept that emerged in 1968 under the impetus of Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, an alternative publication born of his exploration under 200 micrograms of LSD. The DIY movement advocated an alternative lifestyle and resistance to hyper-consumption. Today, this philosophy is far removed from that embodied by OBI, considered to be a mass-market store. This paradox will be the focus of this semester's project. Since DIY has been structured around a publication, students will come full circle by producing an OBI-inspired edition of their own.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Matthieu Gafsou
This year's “Documentary Practices” course is devoted to a territory that is very close to us and, in a way for most of us, very far away: the countryside. For a city-dweller, the countryside is an out-of-town territory where you can go for a walk, where there are farmers, fields and forests. Recent votes in Switzerland testify to a considerable widening of the gap between town and country: the far right would be the place of rurality, while the left would be urban. This territory is not only topologically different from the city, but also seems to be inhabited by people whose lifestyles and thinking are at odds with the city. The reality, however, is obviously more complex and resists such simplification.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Adeline Mollard
During the visual identity course with Adeline Mollard, the students had to develop an identity project promoting a collection chosen by them. Each project includes the design of a catalogue contextualising and presenting the collection, together with the design of a poster.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Guy Meldem
In the age of social media, Instagram has become a true space for graphic experimentation. This semester, first-year Graphic Design students created a printed edition of at least 100 pages, exploring the question: what does it mean to design for Instagram? Through this investigation, they examined the platform’s visual codes, its attention-driven dynamics, and the graphic forms it inspires. Each project reflects on how these creations can be translated, extended, or reinterpreted in the digital space. Balancing printed matter and online presence, these works outline new ways of inhabiting both images and networks.