This is the portfolio of Simon Brühlmann, photographer and graphic designer. Listed below is a selection of my projects as well as the collaborations I took part in.
Festive Poster Photography
For a friend’s birthday party, we made a fun photo session. He brought the terrific outfit, I brought the camera. As location, we used the stage setting of one of Zurich’s theatres.
Game Fashion at “Kunsthalle Wien”
For the collaborative project “gamefashion.org”, led by Margarete Jahrmann and Renate Christian, I did the photography and the web design. Some of the pictures were shot in the famous “Prater Riesenrad”. The project deals with underwear, imprinted with machine-readable code (to be read with mobile phones). Thanks go out to the models Stephan Oismueller and Alice Schneider.
Exhibition “SH Kunst 08”
For this group exhibition, I included none of my abstract imagery, but decided to show only extracts of my portrait work. The pictures shown were not intentionally shot for this occasion, but they accumulated during the past few years in various personal and commissioned projects.
Logo Design “Textualitäten”
Linguistics Professor Hausendorf’s team (Zurich University) wanted a logo for their project “Textualitäten. Theorie und Empirie”. To emphasise this topic of textuality the final logo features only textual elements – and no image or icon.
Web design “saschalarableuler.com”
In collaboration with Stefan Paschke, I developed the portfolio for the actress Sascha Bleuler. Paschke edited the movie clips and took care of programming the JavaScript, while my part consisted in outlining and implementing the visual form, color scheme, and typography by means of html and css.
Tonhalle Exhibition Typography
For an exhibition that was realised by the Music Institute (Zurich University) and the Tonhalle Zurich I did the design of its info panels on the composer Paul Hindemith. The rest of the exhibition shows original documents and items belonging to Paul Hindemith.
Corporate Identity for “Gift”
For the students’ organisation “Gift” I established a new overall identity. To a new logo I added cardboard-themed photos, employed in slight variations for poster-, flyer-, and webdesign. The advantage of the cardboard aesthetic is, that the “Gift” team can always construct 3D-objects (i.e. to advertise an event) that match the look of their identity – and without any costs.
Quickread Fashion, Vienna et al.
Margarete Jahrmann designed several fashion items that are imprinted with “quickread patterns” which can be read and interpreted by mobile phone cameras. The wearer of a thus enhanced dress (for example) can disseminate images or multimedia content. Scanning the patterns will bring this associated visual content to the fore. For the project, I took the photographs and designed its website.
Photography for PR-Brochure
For their new bochure, the Green Party commissioned me to capture the required portraits. The people from their design agency then added the courageous yet appealing comic-style typography.
“Objects of Desire” in Spain
I participated in a Ludic Society project shown at the “Laboral – Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial” in Gijon, Spain. The piece “Objects of Desire” is concerned with technical objects that impose their will on users (i.e. the exhibition visitors). For example, they will force visitors to carry them (the objects) to a different part of the exhibition, or to pray to the objects. A good interview on the topic can be found on “We Make Money not Art”. The Ludic Society constitutes an association of about 52 internationally avowed members aiming to provoke Ludics as emerging discipline.
Book Design for “Z(w)eitwissen”
The «Z(w)eitwissen»-book documents the students’ history in Zurich starting from 1968 up to the present. For the body copy we used Albert-Jan Pool’s FF DIN (Opentype). After some research I found that the Stencil letters of Colonel perfectly matched, so we used this one for titles. Apart from the design, I also contributed some of the book’s photographs. I uploaded a PDF excerpt so you can judge the layout (included photographs were also taken by me).
Graphic Design for Exhibition
Same as the book, the «Z(w)eitwissen»-exhibition (March to April 2008) documented the students’ history in Zurich starting from 1968 up to the present. Being responsible for the entire project’s graphic design, I had to establish and combine a wide range of elements. This included corporate identity from the project’s logo to business cards, stationery and websites. And furthermore: exhibition panels and the above mentioned book.
Photo Exhibition in Schaffhausen
In the above image you see Natalia Huser, curator of the exhibition “Ernte 07”, holding the opening speech at the vernissage. In order to show their work at the “Ernte 07” people had to hand in an application file. The jury accepted 28 out of 81 applications and gladly, mine was among these.
RFID-Play Photos for Norway
Media artist Margarete Jahrmann needed some photographs in order to make a manual for ludic society’s latest gadget. The wunderbaum antenna, seen in the images, enables the Nintendo DS portable console to detect RFID-tags and read their contents. The wunderbaum antenna was presented to the public at the Pikselfestival in Bergen (Norway).
Band Photography for “Tribes of Caïn”
This photo was included in the CD booklet of the band’s latest album. It was taken at the “Bonnie Prince Pub” in Zurich, which provided an intense atomsphere that didn’t need significant improvement.
Postcard with Ludic Society
For an exhibition at the “Kornhausforum Bern”, a promotion postcard was produced in collaboration with Gordan Savicic and Margarete Jahrmann. The card promoted Margarete’s “pongdress” project, in which players could challenge each other in a “pong” game, using the technically enhanced dress as a minimalist computer screen.