Werner Jeker received the Swiss Federal Scholarship for Applied Arts in 1968, founded his own studio in 1972, and co-founded the graphic and industrial design studio Les Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne in 1983. He designs posters for the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (now MUDAC), the Musée de l’Elysée, the Swiss Foundation for Photography, and the Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne. He also designed books, visual identities, and exhibitions for Magnum Photos, Phaidon Press in London, the publisher Actes Sud, and the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève. In addition, he was artistic director of communications for Weimar'99, the European City of Culture (now European Capital of Culture) in 1999, and developed the “Signal Schmerz” pavilion for Expo.02. Under the motto “Be yourself and keep your eyes wide open,” he headed the graphic design department at the École cantonale des beaux-arts et d'art appliqué in Lausanne (now ECAL) from 1974 to 1986.

From 1995 to 1997, he taught at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. From 1997 to 1998, he was a professor at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, and from 2003 to 2007, he was co-head of the Visual Communication Department at the Bern University of the Arts. Photography and typography, black and white, with pointed use of color, cinematically composed—these are the elements of an idiosyncratic visual rhetoric, the result of his exploratory design work. In 1988, Werner Jeker received an award from the International Center of Photography in New York, and in 1989, he won first prize for a new series of Swiss banknotes. Many of his posters have been awarded prizes by the Federal Department of Home Affairs and are part of public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.