The Weltformat Graphic Design Festival draws visitors from all over the world to the Swiss city of Lucerne. Once they arrive, the festival’s companion app serves as a local guide, a timetable of what’s on and an extension of the exhibitions themselves. Augmented and mixed reality, an audio guide and a range of other experimental features transform the user’s smartphone into their personal festival companion and guru.

Innovative UI, novel UX

Interaction with the UI is controlled by the smartphone’s gyro sensor at several points within the app. Longer headings, for example, can only be viewed in full by tilting the device to control the display of text. Apple rejected this pioneering typographic solution upon initial submission to the App Store, citing alleged ‘unusability’.

We were not deterred. After our persuasive counter-arguments earned the app its rightful place in the App Store, it was awarded Gold in the ‘Design’ category at the Best of Swiss Apps Awards in 2018 and Gold in the ‘Mobile Apps’ category at the European Design Awards in 2019.

The Best of Swiss Apps Awards 2018 also brought two further honors for the app, with Bronze awards in the ‘UX + Usability’ and ‘Campaigns’ categories respectively.

At the heart of the app is the gyro-controlled interface.

Enriching content, surprising features

Alongside the festival program and map, the app offers a range of features to immerse visitors deeper in the individual exhibitions. These features include AR, mixed reality and complementary content that is displayed via the user’s device. The visual generator, which is based on text and shape recognition technology, was the key to enabling visitors to decipher the abstract poster for the 2019 festival edition. Milk collaborated with Maximage, the poster designer, on its development.

An experimental AR feature based on shape and text recognition enabled dynamic generation of the festival artwork.

In another innovation, attendees were able to enjoy a 100% virtual exhibition at a festival location defined by GPS coordinates. The app also worked alongside the ‘100 Best Plakate’ (‘100 Best Posters’) exhibition, an annual feature of Weltformat, where viewers could use the app to watch animations mapped to static posters.

An AR feature allowing visitors to view a virtual poster exhibition in space.

An AR feature for bringing static posters to life in the ‘100 Beste Plakate’ (‘100 Best Posters’) exhibition.

Collaboration with exciting designers

For Milk, it was not only the design and development of the app that made this project so exciting but the opportunity for annual collaboration with a changing roster of designers. The app icon for each edition of the festival was developed by the designer of the poster for the same year.