Everyone realizes whether a poster is outstanding immediately upon seeing it: its visual appeal, the stringency of its content, a surprising punch line, its topicality and individuality convince us in an instant. But how can we design such a mind-blowing poster ourselves? A poster is a large, two-dimensional surface with a fascinating illusion of colour and form, movement, space, and perspective. Its design will have to correspond to many different aspects: a key concept and an existing corporate identity, for instance. It will have to be recognizable, understandable, original, and project an independent artistic expression. Right at the beginning of the workshop, we shall enter an inspired, creative flow and develop such a work by means of playful, experimental design techniques and a sharply analytical eye, discovering that there are virtually no limits to the possibilities of good design! In input sessions (a visit to an outstanding design studio, a visit to the Basel Poster Collection, plus insights into my own collection of exclusive screen-printed posters), we shall place the iconic Swiss poster culture in a current, contemporary context and explore what excellent poster design means in 2023. For all this, we have time, motivation, and a perfect setting at our disposal – so let's get to it!
Leander Eisenmann started his career as a graphic designer at pre-school age, so to speak, when he drew a bare climbing tree for monkeys, which had fascinated him during his last visit to the zoo, instead of a pretty tree with apples for a school enrolment test: reduced to the max... In fact, that’s why he was not allowed to enrol right away, though it did not detract from his passion for design and creativity. After some stays in Munich (as a designer at the Siemens Design Center and in the office of Rolf Müller), Amsterdam, and Berlin (as guest artist at Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben), he has been working in his Zurich studio since 1997 focusing on poster and book design, drawing, painting as well as targeted artistic interventions. Since 2002, he has been a lecturer in Visual Communication for both the BA and MA programmes at the Institute Digital Communication Environments IDCE at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. He organizes workshops and gives lectures in Switzerland and abroad, and his work has been shown in book and poster exhibitions in Berlin, Essen, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Lausanne, Lucerne, Seoul, Taipei, and Zurich, among other places. In 2021, his poster series Stop Assad was among the “100 Best Posters Germany, Austria, Switzerland 2020”. In 2022, he exhibited at the Haus Konstruktiv museum in Zurich as part of the Förderpreis Bildende Kunst of the Canton of Zurich.
The Institute Digital Communication Environments (IDCE) offers workshops for students, educators and graphic designers.
The workshops afford insights into topical themes of visual communication for analogue and digital communication channels in a study programme reflecting the rich tradition of the Basel School of Design. Practical exercises with a high level of professionalism form the core of the workshops focus. Reflection as well as contextual knowledge will be conveyed by way of input sessions, allowing participants’ work to be judged within a contemporary, future-oriented context relevant to professional practice. The trinational Rhine River Valley is a unique cultural environment with easy access to France and Germany and to sites such as the Vitra Design Museum (G), the Isenheimer Alter (F), or Ronchamps (F). In Basel, the Fondation Beyeler, Tinguely Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Schaulager, and Museum of Contemporary Art are world-renowned. Besides its museums, Basel offers a rich mixture of cultural events.
Institute Digital Communication Environments (IDCE)
Through digital media and the democratisation of communication channels that goes hand in hand with it, the critical handling of their visual and interaction-based design has become decisively more important, because the social relevance of information and communication has thus fundamentally changed.
