A little of what we’ve been up to.

Along with cooking up a fresh design and renewed rewards system, we helped &pizza meet their security goals by implementing tools to prevent data hacking and fraudulent purchases.

It’s always exciting to see our work recognized and we’re proud to share that we’ve won two American Web Design Awards and two Muse Creative Awards for 2019!

Cognition launched on October 7th, 2010 with this very interesting inaugural post by Happy Cog Founder Jeffrey Zeldman. It began as a “design blog”, then evolved over many years serving a loyal community seeking interesting content relevant to the ever-growing digital space. We’ve heard testimonials from many past and present Happy Cog team members, as well as external parties, about the contribution Cognition served them as they grew their own abilities and careers.

We’ve unveiled our rebrand, participated in conferences, hosted a Craft Meetup, launched new work, and continued to grow as a team!

On May 9, we hosted Brandon Kelly, CEO of Craft CMS (Pixel & Tonic), for our first Meetup at our new Happy Cog office in New York City.

Today we’re happy to announce a number of updates, including a rebrand. For us, our rebrand didn’t start with a logo or visual identity, but by understanding how we work with clients, partners, and each other — and then amplifying our core values.

We’ve already achieved great things working as one team, but effective today we will now proceed under one name: Happy Cog.

Happy Cog has been acquired by Vector Media Group, a multi-faceted digital agency headquartered in New York City.

Creative Bloq gathered 20 of the best design agencies for 2018. Some are huge global players, some are small and niche, and most are somewhere in-between. All are known for their stellar work, their big-name clients, and their original, innovative approaches to design problems. Happy Cog is listed at #10.

In my younger days I performed quite a bit. I liked rehearsing and being on stage. I was a student teacher for an acting class. I somehow became the host of my high school talent show (footage of that has been burned). Yet despite having zero qualms about putting myself out there once my lines had been memorized, I was completely and utterly terrified of auditions. To this day, I have recurring nightmares about auditioning for a play and bombing so miserably that I feel embarrassed for hours after waking up.

When many think about agency culture, they think: ping pong tables, beer, some guy carrying a longboard, and other miscellaneous hip decor. Well, we do have beer and awesome decor. As cool as having all of those things is, it doesn’t keep people employed at a company. When I started with Happy Cog, in June 2016, it was clear to me that having the appearance of a fun culture did not equal a good culture. Good culture is better. Happy Cog focuses on working hard and producing great projects for good people. We recently ditched the office, moved to a coworking space at WeWork, and officially became distributed. Staff rotate in and out of our office space throughout the week, with the bulk of the team being present on Tuesdays. It’s typically pretty quiet around here. So without people around, how does Happy Cog maintain its culture in the distributed workplace?

“Don’t read trash.” This was the last thing Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson said to the audience at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn after a reading and Q&A, amending the writerly advice writerly people always give to the question of how one becomes a better writer. Hardly anyone with a smartphone needs to actually “read more” — reading too little isn’t the problem. “We read while we’re socializing, working, shopping, relaxing, walking, commuting, urinating,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in Magic & Loss. “From a nation that can’t stop eating, we’ve become a nation that can’t stop reading.”