- November 21, 2013
Doing It Our Way
- @hoyboy
- CEO / Partner
Ever since Jeffrey Zeldman founded Happy Cog in 1999, educating our industry has been a cornerstone of the company.
Taking Your Talent to the Web, Designing With Web Standards, and A List Apart started this heritage, and over the years, Jeffrey has continued it with An Event Apart and the A Book Apart series. Happy Cog practitioners have built upon this foundation by teaching, speaking, and writing about web design.
Now that we are designing for a multi-device world, the pace at which things move requires more nimble, frequent methods of disseminating learning tools. The Happy Cog Way was our answer. The release of Ryan Irelan’s “Deploying Websites” screencast for the series puts the final piece of our puzzle in place. In over 12 hours of video and roundtable audio, we’ve detailed many of the components of our digital design and development process. We hope you’ve had a chance to check it all out.
The Happy Cog Way, in hindsight, was inevitable. Earlier this month, we flew the entire company out to Las Vegas for our annual Summit. On our strategy day, I shared our overarching company philosophy for 2014, which can be described in a single word: reach. We feel it’s incumbent upon each of our employees to do everything they can to further the reach of our organization, because I believe our stewardship is not only something we need to maintain, but also build upon. The Happy Cog Way is one way we are doing that, but other ways include speaking, renewing our focus on writing, and creating experiences that unite disparate communities of practitioners who may never have otherwise had a chance to connect. Our Owner Camp and Digital PM Summit are examples of these, and we’ll have much more to share on that front in 2014.
Producing The Happy Cog Way has also exposed many of our practitioners to the world of screencasting and video production/editing. It has inspired us to share our work with clients in more engaging, explanatory ways. If we couldn’t be in the same room to present our work, we created a video in order talk through our thought process. These videos provide an extra layer of understanding as a deliverable gets shared across stakeholders. Additionally, The Happy Cog Way has provided an out-of-the-box resource for our new employees to quickly get up to speed on how we approach our craft. Win-win.
I’m excited by the jolt this endeavor has given us, and we look forward to more meaningful ways to break free of convention to expand our reach. Oh, and as we head into the holiday season, look for a special deal on The Happy Cog Way bundle. Be sure to follow @happycog for the latest.