Swiss Graphic Design and Typography Revisited

Swiss graphic design and typography are representative of Swiss culture, but have themselves also had an impact on this country’s national identity. In the SNSF project Swiss Graphic Design and Typography Revisited, seven universities engage in joint research into the status of Swiss graphic design from today’s perspective. Coordinated by the Bern University of the Arts, researchers of the universities of applied sciences from Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano, and Zurich, as well as from the University of Bern are participating.
In the three sub-projects, mixed groups of researchers from the different institutions investigate into different aspects of Swiss graphic design – its teaching, its networks and its forms of publication.

The result is a critical contribution to our understanding of the emergence and current self-perception of Swiss graphic design and typography. Above and beyond this, the project helps to consolidate ‘design history’ as a field of research and practice in Switzerland, and provides new, relevant findings for the international scholarly discourse on visual communication.