ARTE Culture Touch

arte_culturetouch

Service

Development

Technology

Android

Client

ARTE G.E.I.E.

Year

2015 – 2016

What was Karlmax’s role in the project?

We created an Android version from the template of the iOS app, which had been developed by our partner evenly.

Why does the user need the app?

Because ARTE has its very unique view of the cultural week.

What can the app do?

ARTE Culture Touch is an app that takes a weekly ARTE-type journey through the world of culture. Or rather “took”: the contents on the website and the regular ARTE app are no longer there. The magazine for tablets provides a look into the world of literature, cinema, theatre, philosophy and more. In this way, the app extends the ARTE offering with photos, videos and exclusive interviews. New editions appear weekly, and they can be read, listened to and watched offline as well.

Screenshot of the ARTE Culture Touch app

The challenge

The CultureTouch magazine shouldn’t just be reams of words and heaps of pictures. The quality of content demanded by the ARTE editorial team needed to be reflected in the presentation of the app. A central graphic element of the CultureTouch platform is the triangle. However triangles and screen layouts are not the best of friends. But the suggested layout was fresh and chic, and these qualities needed to be found in the app too. This meant that not only the article pages but even the list of contents should be something special.

And because of the multitude of Android devices, this led us to a lot of positioning and saving problems.

How did we proceed?

The solution in this case came from abstraction—cold, hard mathematics—and optimisation with attention to the tiniest detail, until we finally had the parallaxes sliding across the screen in the way we wanted them to.

The auxiliary classes that we set up specifically to enable layouts with triangles and parallelograms came into their own, and we managed to achieve the effect that ARTE intended. Since the project was an “iOS-first” project, there were of course further challenges. We needed to find a general solution that would enable iOS assets (such as the small parallelogram texture) to be able to be produced by the differently formatted Android devices.

Screenshot of the ARTE Culture Touch app
Impossible Camera