Passionate about the web

We work for clients on a per project basis, but we also develop our own products.

We're passionate about the web and have spent 10 years creating a culture of technical excellence focused on providing our clients with the most user friendly sites and apps.

Find out more about what's going on at Q42 at our Dutch website.

Ready to understand your business' needs

We work for leading local and international companies.
Publishing, education, dating, broadcasting, enterprise, travel, non-profit:
you name it, we've done it.

...and many more

Our philosophy

Each of our 35 employees is a software engineer. Even our interaction designers are — we call them interaction engineers. This is because we believe that understanding the role technology plays in the web is fundamental when making product design and user experience decisions.

Although we're not a full service agency, we always make sure our clients have what they need when they work with us by partnering with great design, security and hosting companies throughout the Netherlands and across the globe.

Clients come to us because we live and breathe the internet. We don't just build stuff, we also know what to build and why.

The name "Q42" reflects that. It's a reference to Douglas Adams' excellent book, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 42 represents the answer, Q represents the question. When clients approach us with a problem, we ask them: "What's the question?" and help them formulate that before moving on to answering it together.

Products

Over the years we've developed several products; here are our two favorites.

  • Xopus— a web-based XML authoring environment (sold to SDL in 2010)
  • Handcraft— an online HTML prototyping app for designers and developers

Offshoots

Every Wednesday afternoon we spend 2 hours hacking away at pet projects. And once a year, we have w00tcamp: 2 full days of hacking. Here are some of the results: