In 1922, her mother (the author Mary Lavater-Sloman) and father (Emil Lavater, an engineer) settled the family back in Winterthur.

[5]Studying in Stockholm, Basel, and Paris, she opened her own studio for applied design in Zurich in 1937 with Gottfried Honegger, her future husband.

From 1944 to 1958 she worked extensively with the young person's magazine Jeunesse designing the covers, supplying illustrations, and being responsible for typography.

It was during this early period in New York that Honegger-Lavater became influenced by American street advertising and began to utilize pictograms as graphic representations of linguistic elements in her work.

Starting in 1963, the Paris-based publisher Adrien Maeght began publication of a series of her folding books broadly entitled Imageries.

These books consist of classic fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen.

[12] Faculty at the University of Erfurt have produced two pedagogical guides for teaching literacy and creativity to young children using Lavater's version of the classic fairy tale, Snow White (Schneewittchen) [13] and the German fairy tale Hans in Luck (Hans im Glück).