Stephane Carpentier, Creative Director, Ringier Studios: “Touching screens are magic”

Stéphane Carpentier, the superstar art director of Ringier Worldwide, is leading the digital offensive of the Swiss company. After launching The Collection, a monothematic iPad publication and releasing two issues dealing with Prince William’s Wedding and The Human Baby, Carpentier is leading creatively Ringier Studios, specialized in creating interactive content apps for a global market.

Stephane Carpentier

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My main concern during this interview is: what happens to content when it goes to the tablet/becomes digital. You’ve been an art director for how long, 25 years maybe. Could we call the change we’re living these days the greatest?

I’ve been a graphic designer and an art director for 30 years, working for newspapers and magazines, but resisting to switch to digital until recently. Internet and its ugly news websites didn’t seem to be interesting. On the contrary, we had lost there centuries of typographic culture. When the iPhone came and the iPad was announced I though it was time to be involved in this development. The finger sensitive screens was right away very inspiring.

So what does mean getting involved into digital from an art director’s point of view?

In order not to follow the bad example of internet, I started to search solutions to present information using the technical possibilities of these devices: motion, sound and interactivity. And not copy paste texts and still pictures produced for the print.

First screen of the Ringier app The Global Baby

You sound more like a film director than a print art director.

Smart phones and tablets are screens, like TV sets. Therefore the way information can be presented on these new devices is close to reportage or documentaires done for TV.

So obviously things done for tablets include dynamic images (movies) and sound. What else has changed? Has the text amount gone down? Has the illustration became bigger…?

Text remains important and I personally like reading on tablets, but it must also use the interactive possibilities of this new technology. On our education apps for example, the text can be read in 3 different colors, difficult words have a dictionary function etc.

Ringier Studios uses a prototype touch screen for design work

Precisely my point Tablets and smart phones are closer to the TV set than to the computer screen. They are used for fun and they mean pleasure, opposite to the computer, which means work, utilitarism. No wonder Office apps are much more developed on computers than on tablets.

Yes, tactile screens are fascinating especially if the content is as magic as the manipulation.

How does the work for digital differs from the work for a magazine, for example?

The work for digital is much more complicated and the result is much more attractive. The design for print is made by a team of graphic designers using the material produced by editors and photographers. For digital, the team is a mix of several competences: 3D artists, video artists, sound designers, programmers etc. For a print production, the art director is conducting a sextet, but for the digital it looks more like a philharmonic orchestra.

Nice comparison. What about the product resulting? Except for the multimedia and interactive attributes, which are quite obvious, what else has changed?

For digital, the surface is less limited than for print products. Adding a page (or a screen) in a publication doesn’t cost millions, like for paper, but only the price of its content. Therefore art directors and editors are tempted to put more visuals. It is however a mistake; one must continue to select the most relevant material.

Family tree in the Prince William publication

So somehow it’s about adding more illustration to the same amount of text than about decreasing the text amount in order to put more photos, movies etc.?

I don’t think that the text will suffer from the bigger choice of visuals, in terms of proportions. Simply, there are other ways to explain things than long texts. Motion graphics is a new and fantastic graphic technique which enables us to present very complicated topics in a very clear way, for example.

You’ve mentioned more than once “touching screens.” Which reminds me of something interesting about magazines too. Their English name, “glossy.” Which has more to do with the feel/touch than with the reflecting quality of the paper. I’ve seen studies that said the acquisition impulse has a lot to do with the desire to feel the magazines. Does anything similar happen with touch screens? Somehow they get dirty with fingerprints very easily, but this doesn’t make them less desirable.

Touching screens are magic. You remember the movie with Tom Cruise, in which he was manipulating hologram screens floating in front of him (Minority Report, 2002 – n.r.). It looked science fiction but now it’s reality. The touching screens of phones and tablets is only the begining of this development. At Ringier Studios we’re now working on touching screens which can be windows, tables, walls or any flat surface. Quite close to what Tom Cruise has in his movie. And, yes, one should invent the screen which never get dirty.

If something else would be invented about all this, what would you like it to be?

Well, at the moment there are enough new things coming all the time to keep me busy. What could and must be improved is the capacity of the devices. At the moment, they are limited in terms of power and memory. With our rich content we push them to their limits.

Carpentier: "What could and must be improved is the capacity of the devices"

OK. Back to paper. Have you recently done any print work? Is it frustrating to go back or nice?

I’m still an art consultant for a few publications, among them Elle Vietnam, and still enjoy working for print publications. But the digital development is of course much more challenging. I would feel punished if I had to go back to being a print art director only.

A question about my job. I came from writing. Do you think writers are disappearing or becoming less important? Somehow I’m worried about that, although I’ve switched to digital, consultancy etc. several years ago and I’m not in danger of becoming unemployed.

Well written texts are still successful. See The New Yorker iPad edition for example. And I think that it is too early to know what will be the model for publications in the future. I don’t see why there would be less text or why the editors’ work would be less important. We can imagine the most impressive animation or 3D infographic: without the right research and the right information, it wouldn’t make any sense.

Information is different from the text It can be numbers – you’ve mentioned them before, and this has to do with the so-called “data journalism.” But nevertheless, let’s move on the Romanian market. You’ve been very influential here at the beginning of the last decade, by touching more or less all the Ringier titles in Romania: relaunches, face lifts and so on. Are you still connected with what happens on the Romanian market?

Unfortunately not. Being based in Vietnam for one year and working on global digital publications makes me feel closer to the Asian and US markets than to the charming East European countries.

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> Mike Schmidt, Art Director: The Daily is like an interactive daily magazine

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