Name: Happy Cog
Price range: $

Defining our industry's methodologies, standards, and culture have long been a part of Happy Cog's values.

We started Cognition as a product to offer advice, create a dialogue, and serve our industry and clients to help them with their goals and aspirations.

Learn more about Happy Cog at happycog.com.

Audio: Cognition Roundtable

1/29/14

by Greg Storey

Pop on your headphones (or why not be that coworker who “accidentally” plays over your office’s sound system). Welcome to the first installation of Cognition Roundtable, where we have a casual conversation with Happy Cog folks.

In this 24-minute session, our VPs of Project Management, Design, and Technology sit down to discuss changes we made to our process in 2013 and how we’re going to apply what we learned to make improvements in the new year. During our conversation, we discuss how adding HTML wireframes to our arsenal has helped us illustrate responsive behavior and how more modular design systems, accompanied by the right documentation, are better future-proofing our work. Changes like these have fostered a stronger partnership between our own designers and developers, and they’ve enabled us to collaborate more effectively with our clients.
Switch Programming

1/23/14

by Mark Huot

There are countless sayings about fresh perspective: “A little distance will give you a whole new perspective,” “You need to step away for a while,” etc. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where that’s not always possible—or practical. I have a very hard time getting up and walking away from my computer when I’m in the middle of a problem. My mind wants to sit and work right through it, no matter how long it takes.

Luckily, I work at a company that encourages collaborative problem solving. Someone always walks by my desk, hears my mutter, and asks me what’s up. Typically, explaining the issue is enough to help solve it (or at least put me on the correct track).
Do it once. Do it right.

1/16/14

by Sophie Shepherd

I am knee-deep in my first home renovation. My latest project was to replace all of the trim—around the doors, floors, and windows—which, while labor intensive, sounded to me like a simple enough project. After ripping out the old stuff, I found that my seemingly well-installed floors were anything but. The floor was inches away from the wall, and none of our doorjambs were actually connected to anything. I thought I had one big job ahead of me, but it turned out I had three. Whoever did the work the first time took the easy route, leaving me with extra work.
Make, Do.

1/9/14

by Greg Storey

This is for everyone who wants to achieve greatness, tries too hard, and ends up driving their efforts right into the ground.

In my life, I’ve had a few notable personal achievements which I believe merited a celebration—champagne, a ticker tape parade, wild applause—but went relatively (okay, completely) unnoticed. Two come to mind:
Chairman's Message

1/2/14

by Jeffrey Zeldman

Never look back, Steve Jobs said, or maybe it was Bernie Madoff. But at this time of year, it is customary to look at where we’ve been, and take educated guesses about where we’re going.

As web designers, we are in a time of new patterns. But we are making sense of these patterns and naming them. I traveled the world this year. Everywhere I went I heard the same four or five ideas.

From Cardiff to Costa Mesa, in every business meeting and at every conference I attended, we all spoke of responsive websites, finding new design and approval processes, and the challenge of delivering great design and appropriate content to a continually expanding universe of devices.
Re-cognition 2013

12/18/13

by Alison Harshbarger

It’s been a memorable year for us at Happy Cog. 2012 was big, but 2013 was even bigger, so we’re taking some time to reflect—both in our offices and here on Cognition.

We welcomed 14 new people this year, making Happy Cog the largest group of talented, fun-loving folks it’s ever been. Some highlights from this year: launching websites for AMC Theatres, Black Hills Corporation (and its trio of utility sites), Yale School of Management, Harvard Business School, and Longwood Gardens; working with Iron Chef Jose Garces’ team to create a design system for its restaurant websites—and breaking into an industry we’ve been a fan of for quite some time; working with our friends at MTV on our third O Music Awards site and celebration; and collaborating with talented folks at Crush & Lovely to create a video about our work with Ben & Jerry’s.
Coding is Believing

12/12/13

by Katie Kovalcin

There’s something that’s hard for some of us web designers to just flat out admit: we stubbornly hate to code. I’m a designer, dammit. I live and breathe Creative Suite. Give me Photoshop or give me death. My former coding knowledge included two things: what a div is, and how to stylize my MySpace page (circa 2004).

And without even realizing it, my attitude has changed, seemingly overnight.

Within the past month, I have learned to build responsive, HTML wireframes using Foundation and Compass. The initial setup was enough to make me want to run away and join the circus. With the added confusion at first, it seemed like everything broke if I merely looked at my code the wrong way. But, with patience, coaching, and helpful documentation, it soon clicked—and with only a few tears shed along the way.
War on Spec

12/5/13

by Joe Rinaldi

Some agencies adhere to the mantra “you get the clients you deserve.” If that’s the case, clients also get the results they deserve—especially when they hire based on spec. This past year, I watched two projects implode after they landed with other agencies who provided spec work in the sales process. I’m not typically a sore loser, but if you hire a partner based off of spec work, you’re digging your own grave.
Doing It Our Way

11/21/13

by Greg Hoy

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.
Automating Your Deployments

11/14/13

by Mark Huot

Deploying a website to a web server is hard. Not “It’ll take some extra time” hard or “We’ll need some help” hard. It’s “Get a whiteboard and plan out the thing A Beautiful Mind-style” hard. It’s easy to look at your code, look at your server, and just drag/drop files to production. It’s a lot more difficult to set up an automated system that will do that for you.

At Happy Cog, we work in a variety of technical situations, and our deployment strategies must be extensible enough to suit each and every need. We deploy to Windows servers and to *nix servers. In some situations, we deploy code as well as content. We deploy PHP websites on some servers and Ruby web workers on others.

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