The statement, “We actually try to look at other websites as little as possible,” is probably not one you would expect to hear coming from the artistic director and cofounder of a company that made its name on the basis of its online work. Yet Florian Schmitt of London-based agency Hi-ReS! couldn’t be more sincere when he says it. Respectful but definite, this is a man who doesn’t mince words. As he adds candidly, “Many designers are simply perfecting the brochure-style look of so many websites right now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—there is some good work out there—but it’s not as exciting as some of the more left-field work you can find.”

Schmitt is certainly well placed to observe and comment on the state of the interactive design industry. Having moved from his native Germany to England in 1999, he and partner (in both work and life) Alexandra Jugovic chose to set up shop in Shoreditch, an area shortly to become the epicenter of all things dotcom. And though the pair initially resisted the twinkly, moving lights of interactive work to concentrate on their studied disciplines of print and 3D design, chancing across a trial copy of Flash soon changed all that.

“We felt we couldn’t express ourselves in HTML,” explains Jugovic. “But when we discovered Flash we found that we were able to combine what we loved to do—motion graphics, design, and music—with interactivity and narrative. We created an experimental first website, soulbath.com, and that was the beginning of our love affair with the web.” Also the beginning of the design community’s love affair with the couple and their fledgling company, as soulbath.com and its associated exhibition, clickhere!, a neat satirical take on online advertising, propelled them to the forefront of the nascent interactive design movement.