Emigre magazine
Emigre was a typography magazine that had considerable significance at the end of the last century as it questioned the modern canon in terms of grid, composition and legibility. Its editors and designers, Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko, initiated a debate that popularized typography through advertising and graphic design.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic magazines that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the magazines in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century editorial design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.

Aristotle first explored the idea of becoming by doing, he says ‘we become just by doing just things, moderate by doing moderate things, brave by doing brave things.’

That same idea translates today in the saying ‘Fake it till you make it’.

But when do we make it? How do we make it? Is making it an external or internal feeling?

Does anyone ever tell us: ‘You made it. Well done. You’ve arrived’?

In this talk, Samar Maakaroun will share stories, projects, moments  from her career that fall somehow between the faking and the making, and what it all comes down to.

Arab and British in equal measure, Samar Maakaroun is a designer and creative director renowned for her creatively multilingual approach to design.

Growing up in Beirut before moving to London in 2005, Samar is fluent in three languages and two cultures. Spanning 20+ years across branding, digital storytelling, scenography and typography, her career has focused on balancing aesthetics, context and heritage with brand voice and purpose.

In a globalized world with burgeoning diasporic communities in every city, Samar believes in embracing the fluidity and nuances of identity, seeing complexity as a source of creative inspiration and narrative power. Her work explores the space in-between – where cultures and languages intersect, integrate, align or diverge.

Samar founded Right to Left in 2021, a design agency that straddles cultures and typographic traditions. Specialising in designing for hybrid brands, the multidisciplinary team speaks seven languages and crosses three generations, working to fluidly integrate worlds, cultures and languages across naming, brand strategy, brands systems and identities.

An example of their language-hopping, culture-crossing approach manifested in the typographic project, 29 Words for 29 Letters, which explores language, translation, and the fluidity of meaning through design.

In 2023, Samar brought her Right to Left team to Pentagram‘s London office, where she joined as one of the eleven partners.

The aim of the workshop is to create a graphic object that interacts with wind and will be able to generate energy. During the workshop the participants will develop their own Wind Thing. These objects should unite the artistic appearance of a kinetic object with the function of a small scale wind turbine.

Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter founded the interdisciplinary studio honey & bunny in Vienna in 2003. They developed and built several loft conversions, stores and apartments, directed “food design – the film”, created the exhibitions “food design” for the Designforum MQ in Vienna, “food | design | humanity” in Lodz and “eat | body | design” in Zurich, among others. Their installation “EAT DESIGN” is part of the permanent collection of the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts.

Honey & bunny have taken part in numerous international solo and group exhibitions as designers and Eat Art artists. Most recently, they created the installations “room 333” for the Museum of the Image in Breda/ NL, “food design objects” for the Palazzo Triennale in Milan, “table manners” for the Gwangju Biennale and “eat VALUE design” for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Honey & bunny developed and presented design and eat art performances at Paris Design Week 2015, Expo Milan 2015 and Republic in Salzburg, among others.

Continuing the construction game, the aim of the workshop is to imagine a simple system for constructing cellular kites. To add a very specific constraint to kite flyers, these kites will need to be foldable and relatively large when built.
At the end of the workshop all the kites must be hung in the school entrance hall. These kites must be aesthetic and poetic but also well thought in their construction system. The aim of the workshop is to explore repetitive geometric shapes with specific kite materials such as the spinnaker or structures. It is also important to think about kites that tell a story and create a coherent volume common to all participants.

Victor Guerithault (born in 1993, Paris, FR) is a designer specialized in kites and aerials structures graduated in EESAB Rennes (European School of Arts) in 2018. Passionate about lightweight structures, architectures and kites he found a way to dust off the aerodynes systems in a fun way. Kites are thousand-year-old objects that have the power to create interactions, social links, dreams and memories. The goal is not simply to fly your kites but to build it from A to Z and also to be able to transform it in a few minutes. This game based on 3d parts specially created for these kites, allows the construction of more than 300 different shapes.

Guided by basic but equally complex geometries, these aerodynes are 100% customizable, making them it’s first quality. Indeed, all the projects, collaborations or requests on which I worked saw the light of day thanks to this system. I already worked for Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Le Coq Sportif and Burberry.
This building game allow me to work with different structures like schools, brands and festivals.
Kites are serious children’s objects, several recognized designers or architects have become passionate about these age-old objects, such as the couple Charles and Ray Eames.

Join us for an immersive one-week course tailored for designers, where we’ll explore the integration of AI into the creative process. This professional program offers a hands-on experience with the latest AI tools, empowering you to innovate and elevate your design work. Perfect for those looking to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of design, our course is a blend of practical skills and cutting-edge knowledge. Because everybody is afraid of losing their jobs to AI.

Meet a dynamic duo Thinh Truong (Artificial) and Vero Gryshchuk (Intelligence) in the world of design and AI education. Vero, a graphic design grad from Elisava and speculative design aficionado. Thinh Truong, a playful yet insightful multidisciplinary designer, a motion graphic grad from IED Barcelona. Together their fates twisted at Domestic Data Streamers where they began the AI journey diving deep into AI research and its application in creative industry. 

They’re not just teachers but fun-seekers, blending design expertise with generative AI. Their classes? A creative journey at the exciting crossroads of design and experimental prompting.

The founders of BIG-GAME chose to study design because they wanted to create objects that would become part of people’s daily lives. Almost 20 years after founding the studio, transforming an idea into a product is still the most exciting part of their work. Design is not a hard science, there is no right or wrong. There are many ways to get from an idea to a finished product. Sometimes they take inspiration from unusual places and use their own methods to create models and prototypes.

Augustin Scott de Martinville, Grégoire Jeanmonod and Elric Petit are BIG-GAME. The studio describes its work as simple, functional and optimistic. It produces a variety of products and accessories for companies such as Alessi, Hay, Karimoku New Standard, Muji, Magis or Muuto. BIG-GAME’s work is often accessible, charming and, above all, useful.

The studio has received numerous awards including the Swiss Design Award, the iF design award, the Wallpaper Design Award, the Good Design Award, the Hublot Design Award and Design Preis Schweiz. BIG-GAME’s works are part of the collections of the Museum fur Gestaltung, the Vitra Design Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou as well as the MoMA.The studio is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In addition to their design work, the three founders of BIG-GAME also serve as professors at ECAL / University of Arts and Design Lausanne.

The Face magazine
Magazines are a unique document of the spirit of their time. The Face, designed by Neville Brody between 1981 and 1986, is a good example of total graphic work. Focused on music and fashion, its style was highly influential and largely defined the aesthetics of the 1980s.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic magazines that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the magazines in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century editorial design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.

Positive and negative restrictions in graphic design

When do restrictions in the design help creativity, and when do they require us to find new solutions? Under the prism of this question, each component of a layout will be reviewed during this lecture and analyzed from different angles (grid-system, text block, typeface and materiality).

Born in 1990 in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, Giliane Cachin is an independent graphic designer based in Zurich. After graduating from ECAL in 2014, she worked for the studio NORM, as well as for the Lineto foundry and its founder Cornel Windlin. Today, beside running her own studio, she teaches editorial design at ECAL and typography at ZHdK, together with David Keshavjee and Marietta Eugster.

As a child, Giliane Cachin accompanied her engineer father to print industry fairs and was fascinated by all types of data visualization, such as technical drawings, information tables, color print tests etc. Today, in her practice, she likes to work around the density of information and the implementation of grid systems to render content clear and accessible all while letting the available data guide her designs.