Badesaison – the Swiss design studio that can handle everything from Dada to music

Words by Lucy Bourton, Friday 26 August 2016

Earlier this year graphic design studio Badesaison created an advertising campaign for “Perlaton”, an annual music festival held in Zurich. The studio’s approach to design is ideal for the event – unbiased in genre or taste – and in many ways the studio shares values that represent the festival as a whole. For this campaign the studio reference a number of typefaces that could be related to any genre of music, a gothic style balanced against graffiti typography. Their ability of combining and contrasting elements doesn’t stop there. Black and white layouts are mixed with highly saturated still life photography which sit comfortably on the page they’ve designed for it.

Back in May the studio created the official program for Festspiele Zurich 2016 dedicated to the anniversary of Dadaism. “This machine we created is a collage from a very old tool catalogue, we found in a thrift shop” the duo explain, “Our inspiration was the french dadaist Francis Picabia and his imaginitive blue prints. It works a flow chart, that guides the reader to a certain event of his interest.”

More recently Badesaison designed Wir Sind Da a publication for the masters degree of fine arts for the University of Arts Lucerne. For the brief they shot a “photographic portrait of the city” where the exhibition took place. “The individual characteristics of the City, with its huge factories and construction sites is reflected in our design as well as in the artworks of the students,” say the designers.

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