ECAL Graphic Design

Graphic design in the 2010s

A sourcebook of graphic design by one of the leading European art schools, the ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, headed by Alexis Georgacopoulos. Designed and art directed by Gilles Gavillet, this volume aims to show the variety of productions dealing with publishing, digital interfaces, and interactive devices, as well as to highlight the wealth of typographic practices in the field of contemporary design.

As François Rappo writes in this volume, “our everyday experience of graphic spaces, to use a generic term, is constantly expanding; spaces, whether static or dynamic and interactive—architecture, interfaces, posters, pages, packaging, screens—now form a new, continuous, optical landscape … Following the logo-centric models inspired by semiotics, or drawing directly on the Conceptual art of the 1970s, today’s graphic design has seen renewed interest in the sensory dimension of the visual experience, in terms of its qualities, modalities, and potential for modelization … The ECAL graphic design work showcased in the present publication—and today’s design agenda—reveals the search for a synthesis, or rather a remix, of a certain fascination for the experiential nature of media, foregrounded as an innovative exploratory quality that in itself justifies the project, together with a focus on the contextual reality of the message and its social implications. This is a synthetic vision that is still on a quest for its own explicit models and that may dream of abolishing the figure of the author, a hangover from the 2000s, in favor of a broadly conceived perceptual community.”

Published with ECAL, University of Art and Design, Lausanne.