After an auspicious start in the early days of the internet industry, helming the Financial Times Media & Telecoms online division back in the late nineties, Miguel Ripoll worked for a few years as a Creative Director in London (Intervid, EyeToEye) building ground-breaking websites for British Telecom, ITV, Arthur Andersen, MoneyWorld, and Liberty, the iconic department store. Since launching his independent studio in 2000, he has worked for major corporate clients in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, advising the likes of Santander Bank, the Spanish government, and many other private investment funds and companies on branding and digital transformation strategies.
A leading expert in the design and coding of interfaces for complex information systems, he has recently built multi-author publishing platforms for Yale University, Princeton University / Sciences Po Paris, Columbia University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Historical Association.
Over the last twenty years, he has designed more than a hundred visually striking and technically innovative projects for top cultural institutions such as the Qatar Foundation, the University of California - Berkeley, Lund University in Sweden, Hofstra University, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Stony Brook University, Purdue University Press, the King Hassan II Fund, and the National Library of Morocco. He has also directed digital initiatives for the governments of Sweden, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Spain (where he produced the official website for Salamanca, European Capital of Culture, and consulted on web strategy for the Ministry of Defence).
His instantly recognisable visual style (which, in addition to web and print design, he has applied to several high-profile film and theatre projects, as well as to branding, packaging, and product design), has also been seen at exhibitions in leading museums like the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Institut du Monde Arab in Paris, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, and the Cervantes Institute.
Featured in books such as “The Web Design Idea Book”, “Contemporary Islamic Design”, “Designing with Type”, “Sexy Web Design”, “Hiatus”, “Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design”, “Signs of the Century”, “Nuevo Diccionario de Publicidad, Relaciones Públicas y Comunicación Corporativa”,
“Type in Motion: Innovations in Digital Graphics” — and twice on the cover of the annual “The Web Design Index”, as well as in publications like Communication Arts, Net Magazine, PCWorld, Computer Arts, Web Design Magazine, Shift Japan, Creative Review, and Internet Magazine, Miguel Ripoll has been profiled in more than fifty interviews in Spanish newspapers, including cover stories in El Mundo, ABC and Información, as well as in CNN, Deutsche Welle, the BBC, and all the main television networks in Spain. He was on the cover of leading newspaper El País Semanal, for which he has also written opinion pieces on technology and digital design.
He has directed two international web conferences, curated and designed exhibitions in Europe and the Middle East, and has been a keynote speaker at major events like the Internet Global Conference, Inter / Media, the Future of Web Design in London, etc. He was also president of the jury at the New Media RO Awards in Bucharest (Romania), and a jury member at the prestigious technology FPRJ Awards in Spain, with Nobel laureate profs. Paul Berg, Illya Prigogine, Hamilton Smith, and Jerome Friedman.
Miguel was a Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and has also been invited to give lectures at Columbia University in New York, Trondheim University in Norway, Lund University in Sweden, and Liège University in Belgium. In Spain, he has taught seminars and master-classes on design, branding, and web technologies at the University Carlos III in Madrid, University of Alicante, Nebrija University, University of Navarra, University of Tarragona, and the IESE Business School.
Miguel Ripoll read History of Art and Musicology at the universities of Macerata and Bologna in Italy, and graduated summa cum laude with Special Distinction in Comparative Literature at the University of London, where he also completed research for an MPhil and was a Visiting Lecturer at University College (UCL).
Fluent in five natural languages (Spanish, English, Italian, Catalan, and French — plus another four artificial ones: HTML, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript), he has lived in five countries, written poetry and essays on literature, design and technology, and translated best-selling novels by Tom Sharpe and Alan Hollinghurst, published in Spain by Anagrama.