Zaniah

Type "mariage" into Zaniah's own site search and the answer comes back blunt: "Rien Trouvé." Nothing found. That is not a gap in a portfolio that forgot to update itself. It is the honest state of a studio whose published work runs to corporate identity, institutional publishing and greeting cards for banks, clinics and city government, and never once touches a wedding.

Zaniah is also the one agency-scale listing in this category. Where several of its neighbours here are a single name working alone, Zaniah.ch sàrl runs as a registered company out of Rue Centrale 17 in Orbe, between Yverdon and Lausanne, with 3 named graphic designers on its "L'atelier" page: Natacha Cattin, who founded the studio in 2005 and now also teaches design and prepress at the Yverdon engineering school, HEIG-VD; Dagmar, who joined in 2009 and earned her graphic design CFC diploma in 2015; and Daniela, trained in multimedia design at ERACOM. The studio's own history page still describes itself as having "15 ans de création graphique" (15 years of graphic design) and "30'000 heures de mise en page" (30'000 hours of layout work), a line that only adds up against the 2005 founding date if nobody has rewritten it since around 2020. The portfolio pages around it were touched as recently as April 2026, so the work reads current even where that one sentence about the studio's own age does not.

The word that shows up constantly on this site, papeterie, means corporate stationery here: letterhead, envelopes, business cards, compliment slips, the material a law firm or a lab hands a visitor. Zaniah's "Identités visuelles" portfolio lists 15 such projects, none of them a wedding. A general surgery clinic, Amethyst Chirurgie, got a logo built around what the studio calls a feminine image. A cybersecurity consultancy, Redstone Consulting, got a full identity and a leaflet. A medical services firm, resot.care, got a logo, stationery, forms, a website and an animated explainer graphic. Bactolab, a medical analysis laboratory, had its identity refreshed when a new family generation took over the business. Stericenter, in medical waste handling, got vehicle livery and exhibition stands to match its new logo. Renouvaud, the reservation catalogue tool for Lausanne's university library, got a logo and an interface. A 2-partner law firm, G-BP avocates, asked for something that broke from the classicism of the profession while staying professional; a timber-construction contractor, Jean-Luc Risse, a logistics company, Dexal logistique, and a real-estate brand, Lakeview, round out the list. So-Gourmet's identity work extended to Zaniah directing the product photography for its own packaging. None of this is bridal work. All of it is the same skillset a stationery buyer is actually shopping for: a visual system built to survive contact with a printer.

Zaniah's dedicated greeting-card and invitation page, "Cartes de vœux et invitations," is the closest this agency gets to what the rest of this category makes, and it works better as a process sample than as a catalogue. It shows 10 pieces, all corporate cards, none for a wedding. 3 went to Banque Raiffeisen Nyon-La Vallée: an embossed, folded card finished with hot silver foil and a die cut; a die-cut, folded card in 3 colours with 1 metallic ink; and a die-cut, folded card on coloured stock with metallic ink. 3 went to Marcel Blanc & Cie, a medical-equipment supplier whose logo Zaniah redesigned in 2008 against an original dating to 1961: a laser-cut card on coloured paper with metallic print, an embossed and folded card on offset stock, and a card pairing a die cut with spot UV varnish over 4-colour process print. 2 went to Deriaz, a carpentry and timber-frame firm: a laser-cut card on metallic paper with opaque white digital printing, and a 2-colour card with 1 metallic ink on uncoated stock. A donations mailing for the Fondation de Vernand used a special die-cut envelope with 4-colour process print, and Zaniah's own promotional card used 3 colours including a fluorescent ink. 2 of the 10 pieces were made as a subcontractor rather than a direct hire, credited "sous mandat TALK" and "sous mandat Magenta communication," meaning Zaniah did the design work while another communications agency held the client relationship. What is absent from all 10 is as telling as what is present: no letterpress anywhere on the site, and no hand calligraphy. Zaniah designs; its own terms of service state that printing itself, along with photography, copywriting and development, is commissioned out to third-party suppliers on the client's behalf.

What CHF 120 an hour actually buys

There is no product catalogue here, no minimum order quantity and no published turnaround time, because Zaniah does not sell items, it sells hours against a mandate. Its 2024 general terms set the rate at CHF 120 an hour, excluding tax, stated twice: once as the standard fee and again as the rate charged if a client hands over source files that need reworking before use. Every job starts with a devis estimatif, a preliminary estimate, rather than a fixed price list. Revisions are built into that estimate only up to a point: once a client has chosen a creative direction, corrections against that direction are included, but reversing the direction after the fact triggers a new quote, and the studio reserves the right to bill for work already done. Invoices go out at the end of the mandate and are due within 30 days with no discount for early payment; a project running past 2 months can be billed monthly with deposits along the way, and late payment draws a 5% interest charge. Design rights stay with Zaniah until the invoice is paid in full, at which point usage rights pass to the client. All of it runs under Swiss simple-mandate law, Code des Obligations article 394 and following, the same legal shape as hiring an accountant, not a shop selling a printed good off a shelf.

Multilingual editions, a French-only front door

Zaniah's own site carries no English version: the homepage is marked lang="fr-FR", and no hreflang tag or language switcher turned up anywhere checked, from the homepage through the contact form. That gap is not a lack of capability. On its skills page the studio states it typesets multilingual publishing projects in French, German, Italian and Romansh, the 4 national languages, plus English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese, a claim tied to its book work for clients like Editions Attinger, a Suisse romande publishing house whose covers and full interior layouts, including prepping photography for print, Zaniah has produced, and Editions du Château, whose logo it rebuilt for transparency and legibility on a spine. The capability is real and documented in its own client work; it is simply not offered to a website visitor deciding whether the studio can be briefed in English at all.

City hall as a repeat client, not a one-off

The municipal side of the client list runs deeper than a single logo. For the City of Yverdon-les-Bains, Zaniah built the full identity for FYSAP, the city's sports and physical-activity festival, covering a poster, flyers, a programme booklet and an animated teaser for social media, designed the sports service's own annual programme booklet, and produced a set of drone-shot promotional films branded "L'art de vivre à Yverdon-les-Bains" for the city's social channels. That is a design agency embedded in a municipal marketing calendar year after year, the same relationship shape as the repeat greeting-card orders from Banque Raiffeisen Nyon-La Vallée and Marcel Blanc & Cie described above, not a portfolio padded out with one-off logo jobs.

None of this makes Zaniah a wedding stationery studio, and nothing on its own site claims otherwise. What it does put on the table is a print vocabulary already proven at a professional finish: laser die-cutting, embossing, hot foil stamping, spot UV varnish, metallic and fluorescent inks, run for banks and clinics that expect the same quality a couple would want on a save the date. A couple who wants that specific finish, quoted and billed by the hour through a French-language design mandate rather than chosen from a bridal collection, is the actual audience here. A couple who wants an English-speaking specialist walking them through a ready-made range should look elsewhere in this category.