Happy Cog New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco: We design beautiful websites, publish our best ideas, and speak to a worldwide community. Find out more about us.

AIGA

AIGA, the professional association for design, serves more than 16,000 designers through national activities and local programs developed by 55 chapters and over 150 student groups. Throughout their careers, designers turn to the organization and its website to exchange ideas and information, participate in passionate critical analysis, and advance education and ethical practice.

Seeking to reach new audiences in an emerging generation of broadly defined designers and user experience professionals, AIGA invited Happy Cog to redesign its website, containing over a decade of rich, deep content, as well as membership areas, magazine sections, and more.

Bring the content to the user

Happy Cog jettisoned the site’s structure, fashioning a more coherent and more empowering user experience that brings content to the surface instead of forcing visitors to dig for it. Ideas trump navigation; reading is better than searching. Readers become writers through the site’s interactive offerings, and follow content streams that matter to them via RSS and taxonomy-powered contextual links.

The web is not print (but it sure can look like it)

After delivering this optimal architecture, Happy Cog overhauled the site’s look and feel, bringing its typography to a quality level worthy of a revered design association and reminiscent of print. To top it all off, we allowed AIGA’s design archives to visually (and dynamically) intrude at the top of every page. The intrusion functions as a second narrative: each page is about whatever it is about, but it also invites you to dive into the archives for pure visual inspiration.

Partners in progress

• Thirdwave created the magnificent back-end architecture that powers AIGA.org. They can do anything.
• AIGA’s Ric Grefé, Denise Wood, Liz Danzico, and Kelly McLaughlin were brilliant collaborators.

Read more

• Jason Santa Maria: AIGA Redesign
• Jeffrey Zeldman: Happy Cog Redesigns AIGA
• Dan Cederholm: AIGA Redesign

Responsibilities

Information architecture, brand design and consulting, graphic design, user interface design, CSS/XHTML template development.

Selected Work

• A List Apart
• Advertising Age
• AIGA
• The Amanda Project
• American College of Physicians
• Amnesty International USA
• Blogger
• Brighter Planet
• Books-A-Million
• Capgemini
• Carlisle Wide Plank Floors
• Comhaltas
• Dictionary.com
• Fetch Softworks
• Housing Works
• Kongregate
• Krylon
• Ma.gnolia
• MICA
• Mozilla Creative Collective
• Philadelphia (Official Visitor Site)
• The Posse Foundation
• SmartyPig
• 2008 Sundance Film Festival
• Thomson Reuters
• The Today Show
• United Nations/UNIFEM
• Warner Bros. Films
• WordPress
• The World Wide Web Consortium
• W. W. Norton & Company

When you are expected to be the arbiter of excellence in communication design, who do you approach to prove your beliefs in your own values while assuring that you reach into new web audiences with a clear, exciting sense of discovery? Jeffrey Zeldman and Happy Cog, who understand the pillars of great design: empathy and usefulness.

—Ric Grefé, Executive Director, AIGA