VISUAL COMMUNICATION

MENTORS:

PROF. MARION FINK

Fertilizer run-off from industrial agriculture is choking the planet’s oceans, rivers and lakes. Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution feed explosive algal blooms that suck the oxygen from the water as they grow. These algal blooms result in dead zones that pose an ever-increasing threat to marine life as their habitats disappear.
The publication ›Suffocating Waters‹ aims to draw the reader's attention to this issue through tailored infographics and map materials. The specially developed imagery shows the processes on a narrative level and supports the text. The maps provide quantitative information and are intended to encourage readers to conduct their investigations into the correlations between nitrate levels and declining oxygen levels.

MENTORS:

DIRK KOY

The ›Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival‹ is an annual film and music festival held in Lausanne. The primary goal of the ›Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival‹ is to present films and music that largely exist outside the mainstream and profit driven production and distribution circuits.
The poster series is divided into two parts. The imagery in the background shows sound waves in water and is intended to show the part of the experimental music of the festival. The typography in the foreground symbolizes the part of the film. The repetition of the typographic elements and the linear movement is meant to show the feel of the film strip. The interaction of these design elements surprises the viewer and supports the creative experimental claim of the festival.

MENTORS:

PROF. MARION FINK / DIRK KOY / FABIAN KEMPTER

The ›Gässli Film Festival‹ is a short film festival held annually in the ›Gerbergässlein‹ in Basel. As a non-profit event in the Basel region, it conveys cinematic fascination and backgrounds on filmmaking.
The Festival should be communicated through a keyvisual, which works as a poster and as moving media in the form of a teaser. The keyvisual is based on typographic experiments with a tube screen in 4:3 format. This resulted in moving typographic compositions, which should remind the viewer of the nostalgia in the filmmaking of the 80s.

MENTORS:

TED DAVIS

›WindDisplay‹ is an online tool that shows the current wind conditions worldwide. The typography is influenced by real-time data, such as wind strength and wind direction. It should show experimentally how data could be visualized in other ways and how typography can communicate information only through visual appearance. The tool can be individualized by different sliders to change the location or the style of visualization.

MENTORS:

PROF. PHILLIP STAMM / ANNIK TROXLER

›ChezVelo‹ is a local bike store based Basel, which wants to live and pass on the bike lifestyle to its customers.
The new identity is intended to communicate the openness and friendship that prevails in the store. Through a customized visual language the customer should see how the life of a cyclist looks. The website and print media are designed to present these images in the best possible way. In addition to print and online media, jerseys and merchandise were developed too.

MENTORS:

FABIAN KEMPTER

MENTORS:

LUDWIG ZELLER

As a graphic designer I’m curious about how deep learning can be used in design and visual communication. After some experiments with different deep learning methods I asked myself, where I can see the potentials in machine learning processes. Through deep learning, connections between different parameters can be made and lead to new innovations. This finding lead me to the idea of merging different scripts like Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hiragana (the japanese script system) to generate a new multilingual writing system with the help of AI. Therefore I trained StyleGAN with single letters of these different writing systems. Since StyleGAN is a texture-based network, I got very abstract letterforms as output. As a continuation of my experiments I consciously decided against a concrete implementation of this typeface. I wanted to use the output to show the extent to which AI can be used in typography. Therefore I created a moving poster for a fictive typography conference on the topic ›Multilingual Typography‹. The poster is based on moving, multilingual letterforms, which came out of my experiments. The blurring of the letters should inspire new ideas in type design.

MENTORS:

DIRK KOY

Die Titel Sequenz versucht die melancholische Stimmung, welche im Film herrscht, durch ihre Bildwelten aufzugreifen und den Betrachter damit direkt in diese stimmungsvolle und ästhetische Welt einzuführen. Diese Stimmung wird durch abstrakte und transparente Übergänge zwischen den unterschiedlichen typografischen Kompositionen erzeugt. Durch die Wechsel von Schwarz und Weiss wird das Thema der sozialen Ungleichheit, sowie der Frage nach der Menschlichkeit aufgegriffen, auf welche im Film stark eingegangen wird. Die visuelle Stimmung der Bildwelten wird durch den Soundtrack «Boreal Kiss Pt. 1» von Tim Hecker unterzeichnet, welcher die Feinfühligkeit des Filmes und der darin behandelten Themen aufnimmt.