Responses by wild.

Background: The site displays the history of the Österreichische Bundesbahnen (“Austrian Federal Railways,” ÖBB) in an exciting, easy-to-consume way. We split it into an experience part where you can select and epoch and a straightforward information part where the user gets led through different articles.

Larger picture: There was a campaign for the ÖBB’s 100-year anniversary, and our site’s visual language is based on the campaign video. The site was the one place where everything was collected; its purpose is being the new history page of the organization.

Design core: Our favorite element is definitely the navigation by epoch, where you have to select and pull a ticket. We also love the following time-travel transition through the tunnel gives direct feedback to the selection. Since we’re talking about the history of the ÖBB, we wanted to combine the haptic feeling of pulling tickets with the futuristic general look and feel.

Favorite details: We’re proud that the end result was so close to the initial concept. We used actual train tickets from back then to enter the epochs. It was no easy task for us to find someone who both collected historic train tickets and was willing to lend them to us.

We’re also really happy that the client’s content team and papabogner, the marketing agency we worked with, put a lot of effort into preparing the dark times of the ÖBB during World War II. We appreciate that they openly talked about those years instead of just omitting them like so many other companies do.

Challenges: We definitely spent the most time on the main navigation where you can select by ticket. It required a lot of experimenting with the haptics and getting the most manual feeling out of it. It was all about finding the right timing, distance and pulling strength. And, of course, it needed to be a seamless transition from the flying ticket into the tunnel transition, which also took quite some time.

Technology: Craft CMS, React, Tailwind CSS and three.js.