Salt Tram Zürich

The idea

The lion guards Zürich’s coat of arms, and the tram is the city’s most familiar moving object. Büro Mätzener’s concept brought the two together. A lion family lives an ordinary, digitally connected evening: the pair streams on the green couch, the cub games in his room, the lioness takes the last video call of the day. Salt Home (high-speed internet, TV, landline) is never the hero of the scene, just the reason it works. Even the headlines speak dialect: «S’beschti Internet für Züri.»

Process

All visuals were generated in the Freepik AI Suite, combining Google’s Nano Banana Pro with Seedream 4.0. Nano Banana Pro carried the character work, keeping the same lion family recognisable across every scene and revision, while Seedream 4.0 delivered native 4K frames as the base for large format. The masters were upscaled to print resolution (the widest run to 7,000 pixels) and handed to Lorenz Wahl Postproduction for composing and prepress.

The formats dictated the compositions: panoramic scenes for the exterior wrap, portrait crops for the hanging cards, and strict top-down scenes for the floor stickers and table surfaces. The roaring lion on the sofa is built to be looked down at, standing in the aisle. Consistency lives in the set, not the logo: one green couch, one parquet floor, one warm palette across every room of the household.

In the wild

The tram runs on the VBZ network until the end of 2026, inside and out a single lion household: hanging cards, floor stickers, table and shelf surfaces each carry their own scene, and the visuals later moved onto citywide poster formats. The details do the convincing: the Salt router and TV box sit on the shelf, the cub’s game is called «Jungle Adventure», the lioness drinks from an «I ❤ Züri» mug, and a bag of «Sweets for Lions» waits beside the laptop.