A little of what we’ve been up to.

A funny thing happened on the way to the multi-device world we design and live in. The web standards movement happened.

Bless her soul, Bessie stunk at jigsaw puzzles. She seemed less interested in recreating the dissected bucolic scene she’d purchased at Rose’s pharmacy decades ago than she was in hurriedly rearranging and redefining the jumbled mess splashed onto the modest kitchen table in front of her. There was no right way, just her way—and the multiple arrangements that lay ahead were every bit as valid to her as the ordered state its designer printed on the box. She just can’t see well, I figured. I never asked.

Time flies by. Cognition recently crossed its one-hundred-article threshold. While there is nothing particularly newsworthy about this milestone, the interesting fact is that numerous hands cooperate each week to birth a new post. One unique part of this behind-the-scenes magic is the weekly pairing of our author with an in-house illustrator. Editorial illustration, when done well, helps to bring the essence of the article to life via a single, compelling image.

When first planning our test lab, I surveyed my own collection of devices and then asked around our Austin office for people who had some older phones sitting at home in a closet or junk drawer. I was able to pull together a handful of devices, including two older iPhones we tested with during some iOS development work. I purchased the remaining devices.

In 1998, I built my first website. I hadn’t gone to college yet, and my professional goals had little to do with pursuing web design and a lot to do with playing in a rock band. While my peers were mowing lawns, washing cars, and frying things, I was curiously learning about HTML and attempting to share my efforts with the world. As my skills got sharper, I quickly realized that there were businesses out there that would actually pay me to do this… and it certainly beat having to get an afterschool job.

I always hear stories of managers pushing employees to “think outside the box”—to go beyond their day-to-day and find that idea that is unlike anything else. This is a tall order and maybe even a bit unrealistic. If our comfort zone is A, B, and C, how can we expect to find X without first understanding D–W? Because of this, I like to think in terms of “expanding the box” instead of jumping entirely outside of it.

If you’ve surfed the web, you’ve likely stumbled upon adult content or some reference to it. For the purpose of this article, I’d like to ignore the content shown on adult sites in favor of the content type, video, which makes these sites relevant to hosting and hosting issues. Adult content can be traced back to the early 1980s (when dial-up bulletin board systems served all the illicit content), so it’s safe to say it has been a part of the internet from the start. Neither Happy Cog nor Happy Cog Hosting work with sites that serve or publish adult content, but wherever you stand on the morality of porn, it is enlightening to consider the role it has played in shaping standards for online commerce and the way hosting providers do their jobs.

Design conferences are complicated beasts. They are weeklong marathons and single-day sprints. They are hotel ballroom affairs and intimate gatherings. They teach new skills and polish old ones. They appeal to the novice, expert, academic, and hipster alike. And, to add to their intricacy, depending on the marketing angle, we call them symposiums, conventions, festivals, and even the casual [insert word here]-cons.

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. A few hours later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface—the first time humans set foot on another planetary body. The astronauts were explorers. Yet, if they did not share their experiences, their expedition would have provided no meaningful benefits to anyone but themselves. True exploration isn’t just going somewhere or doing something new; it is experiencing something new and communicating that back to those who care.

This can be absolutely anything. Go ahead and think about it for a minute. I recently posed this question at my dConstruct talk (slides / audio) a couple of weeks ago and received a variety of answers. Learning a new language was a popular response. So was learning how to cook, garden, ski, and do “The Robot.”

A while ago I wrote a little post discussing my dive into CSS preprocessing, and, at the time, I wasn’t totally convinced that this hot newness was the best approach for my workflow. I shared my internal struggle with bloated output and questioned if this preprocessor business really did save me that much time. When I wrote the article, I had only worked with LESS, one of several popular CSS preprocessors, as it was a project requirement. Many of you fine folks suggested (both on Cognition and off) that I try Sass. Well, I did. Fast-forward 10 months and HOLY TOLEDO THIS FRONT-END DEV IS SERIOUSLY SASSY AND LOVING IT.

While cruising the boardwalk with my family this weekend, I was struck by what the boardwalk has in common with web design and development: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.