Company Design

More than 400 submissions to the recent "Best of Swiss Web" Award 2012 represent an increase of 30 percent. The industry is booming. And at the forefront of this development is the Zurich-based digital agency Hinderling Volkart. In the fast-growing and highly competitive market of creative online agencies, the company, which has been in existence for barely more than five years, has won the gold award in the "Creation" category of the industry's most important award for the fourth year in a row. No agency has ever achieved this before. The agency's broad-based expertise is also reflected in additional awards in the "Innovation", "Public Affairs" and "Digital Branding Campaigns" categories. In addition to the gold-winning 360°Langstrasse for Swiss Radio and Television, Westnetz.ch also won several awards for Zurich's public transport company (VBZ). The website for Swiss television's documentary series about Langstrasse was praised by the jury as an "excellent, trend-setting project in all respects". The international jury of the AWWWARDS also found this to be the case with 360°Langstrasse and named the project "Site of the Year". To top it all off, the project for SRF also took second place in the "Master of Swiss Web", directly behind this year's winner SBB. This success has since earned the Hinderling Volkart agency five further commissions for new Swiss television programs.

Michael Volkart explains the success of the young Zurich agency with the fact that it has clients "who are also prepared to break new ground". Michael Hinderling adds: "To turn creative ideas into inspiring user experiences, you need highly professional and highly motivated employees, good partners and great joy and enthusiasm for the work. We are very lucky to have all of this."

School friends at the F+F

Anyone who visits the agency in Zurich's Kreis 3 district can sense this atmosphere straight away. An imaginatively furnished open-plan office that is never reminiscent of a creative henhouse. Spacious furnishings, a lounge for chilling out and discussing, a secluded garden for brainstorming sessions and an executive office that joins the creative, consulting and technical fields without a dividing wall. In the basement of the loft there is a photo studio and the technical facilities of two friendly companies - Edge5 by Stephan Meier and Lauschsicht by Kevin Blanc - who work closely with Hinderling Volkart depending on the project. Michael Hinderling and Michael Volkart first came together during their training at R+F. They both attended the preliminary course at the Zurich School of Art and Media Design in 1999 and then the specialist class with the media design course, which was only the second of its kind. During this extended training in art, classic techniques such as lead typesetting and typography continued to be taught. "Classical design with space and images is important and has shaped us," say the two designers. Both of them were already intensively involved with the web and its possibilities during secondary school. Michael Volkart created one of the first websites for Zurich University for the Swiss Bank, where his father worked as a professor, while he was still at secondary school. This reference very quickly brought him further commissions.

Michael Hinderling was able to complete an internship at the motion design agency Regardez due to his school projects after finishing secondary school in Lucerne. At the time, they were designing the visual identity for the TV channels ZDF, 3+ and MTV Pop. The company has since become the agency Le Mob, which has its studio just around the corner from Hinderling Volkart and often works with them. Jürg Steudler, who now works as a producer at Encore Pictures and is also part of Hinderling Volkart's network of specialized suppliers, was also part of the team back then.

After this internship, Michael Hinderling's further path led him to ROSA, a very popular web agency run by Theophil Butz at the time. The agency worked for Swiss television and Cablecom, for example. Hinderling later joined the web agency Eykom as an AD. Then he clicked off for a trip around the world. After school, Michael Volkart continued to specialize in making websites for friends and small companies. From 2001 onwards, there were many start-ups and of course they all had to have a website "at affordable prices, but at a high level". With such orders, both Hinderling and Volkart learned early on to "meet the needs of customers".

When Hinderling returned to Zurich as a freelancer after his trip around the world and the need for websites became the new gold rush, the school friends finally came up with the idea three years after graduating together: Why don't we lump all the jobs together and do it right? That's how Hinderling Volkart was founded in January 2007.

Rapid but natural growth

Even before the business cards were printed, the duo took part in a pitch and won their first major contract, a website for the Swiss Actors' Association. A client that has remained with them to this day. The first employee soon had to be hired as an 80 percent developer. Since then, Hinderling Volkart has "grown continuously" - albeit quite quickly, as the number of employees has almost doubled every year. "We always had too much work and didn't want to turn down any projects. So we were constantly looking for new people. We found it difficult to say no."

During this continuous expansion of the company, eight employees reached the point where Hinderling and Volkart could no longer control everything themselves. If they wanted to continue to work creatively on the design and at the same time acquire new customers, they also had to be able to delegate responsibility. So they looked for a project manager. "That required a lot of trust. We also had to hand over customer relationships for the first time. Previously, we had only employed designers and programmers." In the meantime, the consulting and project management department has been expanded to five people. In total, Hinderling Volkart now employs more than 20 specialists, from the backend under the leadership of Michael Bischof, to consulting with Remo Brunner and the frontend with Severin Klaus. As CD, Michael Hinderling has the area of creation under him. Michael Volkart has taken over the management. "I realized that I could no longer keep up with the high level of our design," he jokes. That's why he now pulls the strings and takes care of strategic issues. "But we make all the important decisions together," say the two of them.

In this shift from designing to managing, the designers have acquired a great deal of know-how about operational management through "learning by doing". They see their new role - keeping an eye on overall quality and managing processes - as an exciting "broadening of horizons". Both are grateful that their fathers - a physicist and a professor of economics - were able to pass on a lot of valuable experience to them as board members when building up the company. The two founders see what distinguishes Hinderling Volkart as a web agency today as the combination of conception, creation, design and implementation. "We have extremely high quality standards - especially in the front end, which is what brings a design to life." There are few companies of their size that combine all of this in-house. But this is precisely why "the innovative and good projects are created, because everything is so interlinked", the two are convinced. Andreas Panzeri