Who’s going where, and when, why and how: the De­part­ment for Mo­bil­i­ty of the Can­ton of Zürich has all the answers. We were asked to visu­al­ise this trea­sure trove of data and bring it into the dig­i­tal age with an in­ter­ac­tive web­site. The bold mar­ket­ing cam­paign behind it was ours to design, too. And what we are es­pe­cial­ly proud of: Switzer­land’s news­pa­per of record, the ven­er­a­ble Neue Zürcher Zei­tung, ran a quite fa­vour­able piece on it.

One app for sev­en dif­fer­ent news­pa­pers: that’s what CH Media, one of Switzer­land’s largest pub­lish­ers, asked us to build. Our reply: We’d be happy to, of course. For An­droid and iPhone, with in-app pur­chas­es, support for read­er-re­porters, and metic­u­lous atten­tion to skeuo­mor­phic de­tail – a prod­uct of its time. Their cus­tomers loved it, and the Best of Swiss Apps jury award­ed our app-devel­op­ment debut a silver medal.

The Fifa World Foot­ball Museum™ called, so we laced up our boots and built a fun app. We in­vis­i­bly at­tached tiny Blue­tooth trans­mit­ters to var­i­ous ex­hibits through­out the museum and asked vi­si­tors to track them down. Col­lect­ing all of them in the app would un­lock a vouch­er for the Fifa Store. Clever and charm­ing, with a dash of gami­fi­ca­tion – and one of our fa­vourite pro­jects to date.

The brief was short and to the point: the Fifa Forward foot­ball de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme was to be an­nounced in the lobby of Fifa head­quar­ters. In our app, we dig­i­tal­ly repro­duced the giant world map mount­ed on one of its walls and com­bined it with geo­lo­ca­ted ar­ti­cles from Fifa Forward – and thus Fifa Planet was born. A simple idea that play­ful­ly con­veyed in­for­ma­tion and wowed the public.

Digital story­telling at the high­est level, in­clud­ing its com­mer­cial roll­out – Fifa Stories was big. From apps to TV and the web, Ellektra de­vel­oped the con­cept, de­sign and func­tion­al pro­to­types in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with the client. For po­lit­i­cal rea­sons, though, the project never got off the ground. It’s un­for­tu­nate, but who knows what the fu­ture will bring. We have the con­cept ready to go at any time.

Bringing Fifa’s of­fi­cial weekly mag­a­zine into dig­i­tal form was an espe­cial­ly im­por­tant as­sign­ment for us – not many or­ga­ni­sa­tions have a glob­al reach, let alone a glob­al fan­base. The pro­ject was rather suc­cess­ful and struck a chord: even Apple and Google took no­tice, fea­tur­ing us as Best New Apps and of­fer­ing mar­ket­ing sup­port. A pro­ject that has had a last­ing im­pact on Ellektra.

Neutra is our hobby and play­ground for devel­op­ing, ap­ply­ing and test­ing the newest tech­no­lo­gies. You might call it a case study app, and at the same time a gen­uine­ly good app for jour­nal­ism, read­ers and au­thors. Un­apolo­get­i­cal­ly simple and fast, with­out opaque algo­rithms or in­tru­sive ads, while en­sur­ing pri­va­cy in every as­pect – our hum­ble way of mak­ing the world a little bit better.

Tx Group, Switzer­land’s largest pub­lisher, set am­bi­tious goals: an app based solely on web tech­nol­o­gy, in­clud­ing a custom pay­ment sys­tem. Natur­ally, we took on the cre­ative direc­tion, which we still look back on fondly. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, the pro­ject was far ahead of its time, and that’s prob­a­bly why it was only on­line for a rela­tively brief period.

The Wochen­zeitung is a rare suc­cess story among news­week­lies: since 1981, the coop­er­a­tively run pub­li­ca­tion has been re­port­ing on every­thing left of the main­stream. They’re also pro­gres­sive when it comes to apps – na­tive­ly pro­grammed for iPhone, iPad and An­droid, and run­ning vir­tu­al­ly un­changed for ten years now. Once again, qual­i­ty work from Ellektra.

Finally, the Ge­samt­ver­kehrs­mo­dell des Kan­tons Zürich is a ver­sa­tile and com­plex soft­ware tool for plan­ning and vi­su­al­is­ing fu­ture traf­fic de­vel­op­ment. As Ellektra has ex­ten­sive ex­per­tise in bring­ing data to life, we were de­light­ed to take on the de­sign of a prin­ted brochure ex­plain­ing this model. An ac­com­pa­ny­ing video and an ac­ces­si­ble PDF ver­sion round­ed out the deliv­er­ables. We quite like the result.