I am a multidisciplinary designer based in Zurich, studying Design (Trends & Identity) at ZHdK. My work often starts with language: I use it to look at visual languages, trends, and everyday situations.
A photographic series of hairdressers’ shop windows across Zurich, combined with hand scans and typography and printed as a leporello.
Zurich has an astonishing number of hairdressers. They all offer more or less the same thing, yet each one presents itself in a completely different way.
I photographed their windows and scanned material from the shops to look at how their visual language shifts with neighbourhood and price range.
<module brief, type & signs>
Type & Signs is an introduction to typography and layout. Starting from places, situations and scenes, it asks what makes a visual expression characteristic and identity-forming.
The brief treated shop windows as the “landing pages” of the analogue city. Together with neon lettering, shop signs, notices at the kiosk and flyposted notes, they shape the atmosphere and local character of a city. In a glocal present, the question is what the local looks like. Starting from shop windows and their displays, the task was to translate them into graphic design through experiments with image and text, resulting in a publication with an image-text series.
<print, leporello><final object>
(P1) 001IMG_5483
(P2) 001IMG_5479(P3) 001IMG_5478
<hand scans><material from the shops, a glimpse into the process>
<installation, exhibition><baked words and bread bags on the long table>
(I) 004installation
Bread Symbols
deconstructing everyday consumption
<№ 004><jan 2025><aufgegabelt / eva wandeler><object><bread><packaging><signage><laser marking><typography>
For the module Aufgegabelt, I looked at how bread, a simple staple once eaten by everyone, turns into an exclusive luxury good and status symbol in certain contexts. Staging, marketing and social dynamics give even everyday things like bread a new meaning.
Buying bread at a specialist bakery or a farmers’ market is no longer just a food choice, it is a form of distinction. Presenting bread with a “story”, be it its regional origin, an ancient grain or a special baking process, signals belonging to a cultural elite that values authenticity and tradition. The inflated language of bread names and descriptions reflects this, and at the same time it is instantly recognisable.
With humour, the project picks up the decadence and often absurd exaggeration of current bread trends and looks at them critically. Its design borrows the aesthetic of contemporary luxury bakeries.
<module brief, aufgegabelt – von tischbesteck und essgeschirr>
Using food as an example, the module explores playful, ironic or controversial objects and products. Eating is more than nourishment: it is part of every culture and shapes our identity. The module looks at the social, political and historical sides of table culture, its rituals and customs, and at the history and meaning of cutlery and tableware.
<bread bags><questions printed on paper bags>
(B) 004bread bags
<sign><steel sign, inspired by the boards in upmarket bakeries>
Inspired by the signs in upmarket bakeries. I cut the metal sign myself and marked the lettering with a laser, using an oxidation technique.
(S) 004loafs
<baking process><dough, shaped into words>
(A) 004status
<visual research><references, images by others>
(R1) 004butter(R2) 004bread as object(R3) 004bakery packaging
A cardboard box as an exhibition space I can simply take, placed on the street. Inside, it is lined with white paper and recalls the white cube of institutional galleries.
A large, distinct paper building stands for the facade of the new Chipperfield extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich, which cost 206 million francs, 118 million of them from public money (88 million from the city of Zurich, 30 million from the canton’s lottery fund). Around it, smaller and varied buildings stand for the diverse, non-commercial cultural scene that cannot benefit from public money. The wall text sets the numbers side by side: around 170 million francs of annual cultural funding in Zurich, most of it going to a few large institutions, against small grants for the independent scene.
The title borrows a wordplay known from Zurich’s squatter scene: “Zureich” reads as “zu reich”, too rich.
<module brief, special edition>
Students become exhibition makers. The module looks at the roles and responsibilities behind a public presentation, and at the power relations and patterns they bring with them. Beyond the content on show, participatory formats, architecture or media can create identity. Starting from exhibitions across Zurich and beyond, from private railway museums and village museums to hip off-spaces, art institutions and the Landesmuseum, we collected printed matter, studied annual reports and analysed design elements and exhibition structures. With this knowledge, each student rethought an existing exhibition and designed an alternative proposal as a model.
<cardboard box, placed on the street><cardboard, paper, tape, 140 × 60 × 60 cm>
(B) 005box(C) 005inside
<exhibition site><für ein sauberes zürich, shared street exhibition of the module>
(D) 005site(E) 005visitors
<exhibition flyer><für ein sauberes zürich, group exhibition>
(F) 005flyer
<reference><kunsthaus zürich, chipperfield extension, image by others>
<final pieces, displayed at kiosk.io><lighter, cards, airpods>
(P) 004final pieces
<label, front and back on tracing paper, click to layer>
charme
<№ 004><oct 2025><meet me at the market / henriette-friederike herm><product><second-hand cowhide><patterns><label design><retail>
A concept for charms to hang on bags, belt loops or wherever the wearer likes, made of three parts with different functions: a holder for lighters, one for cards and one for AirPods cases. Each piece is a handmade one-off, made from second-hand cowhide rugs in the textile workshop at ZHdK. charme combines traditional and contemporary Swiss design.
The design connects the traditional Swiss aesthetic of cowhide with contemporary graphic design. Digital collages of cows and mountain landscapes photographed in the Engadin are combined with bold Helvetica, using distorted justified type as a stylistic device. The labels are printed in two layers on tracing paper, so the layers overlap and add depth.
The pieces were sold at kiosk.io, Geroldstrasse 11, in Zurich. The price list follows the same system as the products: 01 for the lighter, 02 for cards, 03 for AirPods, plus carabiners large and small.
<module brief, meet me at the market>
The module focuses on trend analysis and on the concept, development and production of products that reflect social change in material and aesthetic terms. The goal is to bring the products, made in small editions, into retail. Visits to shops and studios give insight into the market.
<patterns and process><card holder, lighter case, airpods case holder>
develop three different patterns for the charms
measure the patterns and transfer them onto second-hand cowhide rugs
cut out the shapes with a rotary cutter
glue the parts together as a stable base for the fittings
punch holes, set eyelets and rivets
trim the edges again for a clean contour
dye the cut edges with black leather paint and seal them
<№ 009><march 2026><von zuckersteuer bis zuckerstreuer / david jäggi, sabina bösch><still life photography><ethnographic research><plotter print>
A series of photographic still lifes about sugar, one of the most used and most contested ingredients in Western food culture, printed large on a plotter in an edition of three.
The images collect what sugar looks like in everyday life: sugared sweets, canned mango drinks, fruit, glossy packaging, bottles and shelves full of yellow tubs. Colours are pushed until they turn artificial and almost too sweet. Sugar moves between reward, temptation and guilt.
Alongside the images runs a list of terms from the research, grouped into reward, morality and control, rituals and celebrations, and history and politics, from guilty pleasure and diet culture to colonial history and excess.
<module brief, von zuckersteuer bis zuckerstreuer>
The module is about creating image worlds. Based on ethnographic research into an everyday cultural phenomenon, students formulate a question, answer, critique or speculation and translate it into images. Food as an everyday practice is a way to think about social issues, memory and identity. We worked with still life photography, staged arrangements and everyday situations, focusing on sugar, and developed a position of our own, staged as photographic still lifes.
An awareness campaign on the speed and quantity of messages in the digital age, developed as speculative design. Whimsy Mail is a fictional carrier pigeon service for short messages: slow, deliberate and material instead of instant and endless.
The name refers to whimsy, the quality of the playful, light and unpredictable. Every message is given to a pigeon and physically carried along a route, bound to distance and time. The number of messages is limited and delivery takes hours or days. Communication becomes a sequence of set moments instead of a continuous flow.
The campaign speaks to young urban people between 20 and 30 who want to be individual and a little edgy, with a contemporary, trustworthy tone and an ironic undertone. We designed the name, slogan, a pixelated chrome logo, posters, flyers, business cards, letterhead, merch and an animation. The look is slightly medieval and enchanted, with a strong association to old web design: pixels, chrome and cyber vibes.
<animation><made with cavalry>
(B) 010
<poster variations><click to zoom>
(C) 010posters
<flyer><iphone-sized leporello that unfolds lengthwise> <about us, how it works, the numbers>
(D) 010flyer, iphone size, unfolded
<stationery and merch><letterhead, cards, notepad, pencil, tape>
A zine and an essay on bed rotting: lying in bed for hours, scrolling, half-watching TV, doing nothing, and reframing it as self-care or even an act of resistance.
In a hustle culture that tells us to monetise our hobbies and optimise our downtime, refusing to get up can feel almost political. Rest does not need to be earned. But when does rest become avoidance? Capitalism thrives on exhaustion, but it also thrives on escapism: the same platforms that burn us out profit from our need to check out.
From this text, I made a foldable zine. The essay is set in red, in columns, rotated lines and open questions, and it leaves gaps for the reader to interact with and fill in. Its starting point is an excerpt from Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto.
A collage of Swiss media fragments, overlaid with a text of my own printed on tracing paper and folded into a single-sheet zine.
In June 2026, Switzerland voted on the SVP’s popular initiative “No 10-million Switzerland”, also called the sustainability initiative. I collected media voices on the initiative and looked at the discourse surrounding it.
Headlines, images and campaign material became the collage. My text on top is informed by and quotes the book Migrationsland Schweiz. Mythen, Realitäten und Perspektiven. The layers overlap and stand for complexity, transparency and simultaneity.
<text> inspired by and quoting “Migrationsland Schweiz. Mythen, Realitäten und Perspektiven”, eds. Sanija Ameti, Lisa Mazzone, Nadja Mosimann, Cédric Wermuth, Pascal Zwicky
<collage> image material from WOZ, Tages-Anzeiger, SonntagsZeitung, Republik, Blick, and SVP campaign material for the Swiss popular vote on 14.6.2026
<module brief, migration design>
Migration Design asks what a contemporary, forward-looking understanding of migration could look like, and what active contribution design can make. Over three weeks, the module focused on the so-called second and third generation in Switzerland, whose experiences of migration and diaspora differ from those of their parents.
Input from experts and encounters with people with migration experience opened a dialogue about leaving and arriving, the in-between, multiple belongings and questions of identity. The research led to an exhibition setting that makes themes of the post-migrant society visible and widens the social narrative.
It started with a ring-bound zine as a way of exploring my own identity. It asks whether what we own is an expression of identity or a cover for capitalism. What is it all for: beauty, success, status, belonging, love, distraction? It collects shoes, bags and cosmetics, a photo story and a flip book of mix-and-match outfits.
The posters grew out of the zine, from playing around with the same craft materials. Cut-out photographs, drawings, chains, stars and teeth are layered, copied and scanned again until they merge into dense, cold-toned surfaces. The posters opened up another dimension and something more spatial: a poster wall.
The booklet of A3 posters came at the very end, as a way to keep the posters for longer than just the installation.
<zine on identity><ring-bound, collaged by hand>
(Z1) 001spreads(Z2) 001flip book outfits
<poster wall, exhibition><handwritten title in red tape>
A spatial installation about the present moment and how we actively create new ones. I packed four butcher’s trays like supermarket goods and placed them in an ordinary Swiss shopping basket, the kind you find at Coop.
Moments in everyday life often pass unnoticed. Being “in the moment” seems tied to something special: a trip, a purchase, an encounter. Hardly anyone would say they truly lived in the moment on an exhausting commute to a boring job. Those who have free time and money fill it with what everyday life leaves no room for, and I notice the same urge in myself to escape to the mountains when things get stressful.
Each tray sells a way out of the moment, with ingredients and a price: a makeover, a virtual world, religion and spirituality, intoxicants. Escaping a tiring reality is a common need, but a luxury that costs time and money. You can change where you are, what you do and how you look, but you can never fully escape yourself.
<context, admission task>
Home assignment for the admission to the BA Design, Trends & Identity at ZHdK.
<trays, original size a4><packed, labelled, priced>
A written seminar paper on food as a medium of social distinction and identity construction, using the kebab as a case study.
Food often seems like a private matter of taste. Drawing on Bourdieu, Currid-Halkett, Johnston and Baumann, I show that taste is socially learned and tied to class, cultural capital and moral values. What matters is not only what is eaten, but in which context, with which knowledge and in which aesthetic framing.
The kebab spread with Turkish migration to Germany and is now part of everyday culture across classes. Depending on context it is valued very differently: an everyday necessity, an ironic guilty pleasure, or an upgraded “neo kebab”. The paper traces how a seemingly democratised dish is symbolically raised and lowered, and how class, migration, cultural appropriation and colonial continuities show up in it.
<process, ethnographic research><classic kebab and luxury or neo kebab, compared by location, social coding and price>
A written seminar paper about Stone Island and how the brand turned from a technical design project into a subcultural symbol.
Founded in 1982, Stone Island became part of football, rave, grime and streetwear cultures, each appropriating it anew and tying it to its own ideas of authenticity, status and belonging. The thesis: Stone Island has shifted from a subcultural code to an aestheticised accessory of authenticity.
Combining historical research, cultural sociology and an analysis of digital media, I ask what happens to subcultures under capitalism, how their signs get aestheticised and sold, and how authenticity is performed through fashion today.
I am a multidisciplinary designer based in Zurich, currently studying Design (Trends & Identity) at ZHdK. My practice moves between graphic design, research, language, and everyday visual culture. I work across different mediums and develop projects through observation, experimentation, and collaboration.
My work often starts with language. I use it to look at visual languages, trends, and everyday situations. Sometimes this happens through observation and ethnographic research, sometimes through more experimental and process-based work.
I am interested in how people communicate, how certain aesthetics become familiar, and how the things we see and use every day are shaped by social and cultural ideas. For me, design is not only a way of making something look good, but a way of sharing ideas and creating space for discussion.
<cv>
<education>
09.2024 – now
BA Design, Trends & Identity, ZHdKminor: Diversity Politics and the Arts: Post-colonial Perspectives
