services
Continuously, through every shift in how people use it.
Design review plus manual testing: keyboard, screen reader, contrast, and focus management.
Strategists, designers, engineers, and marketers.
We came out of the web standards movement, so accessibility, semantic structure, and designing for screens nobody has shipped yet have been part of the practice from the start. Our designers set breakpoints from the content rather than from a list of devices, which is why the work still holds up on hardware that didn't exist at launch.
The site launched, everyone liked it, and then the market moved and the design had no room to move with it. Designs built around a trend need replacing when the trend passes. Designs built as systems absorb new content types, new campaigns, and new products without a rebuild.
Your marketing team wants to launch a page and has to file a request, wait for a designer, and wait again for a developer. This is the most common reason organizations come to us for a design system, and it's the problem our design team solves first, because a team that can't ship its own pages can't test anything.
Different type, different color logic, different words for the same action. Users notice, and so does anyone comparing you to a competitor who got this right. Web and native app design belong in one system, with shared foundations and platform-appropriate patterns on top.
Remediating an inaccessible site after launch costs several times what designing accessibly would have cost. In one recent audit of a client platform we inherited, a single line of CSS removed the focus ring from every button on the site, which made the whole thing unusable by keyboard. That kind of thing is cheap to prevent and expensive to unwind.
Six areas of work. Most engagements use three or four of them, and you can hire us for one.
Stakeholder interviews, audience definition, analytics review, competitive research, and usability testing. Our strategy lead turns that into a design brief that names the audiences, the content priorities, and the measures of success, so the design conversation stops being a matter of taste.
Our design lead develops two distinct art directions, each with its own typographic point of view and its own use of your brand, then refines the one you choose into full page designs in Figma. You'll have shared access to the file throughout, and you'll see the work as it happens.
We design the system and its documentation, then the pages that come out of it. Every component's relationship to the others matters as much as the component itself, and the deliverable is a Figma library plus the guidance your team needs to extend it without breaking the rules that keep the site coherent.
Native iOS and Android interfaces, plus the harder interior screens most agencies skip: dashboards, account management, permissions, empty states, and error handling. We designed and built the iOS and Android apps that let Capital One's small business customers take payments with Tap to Pay.
WCAG 2.2 Level AA is where our builds start. Our accessibility specialist reviews designs before they're built and tests manually afterward, and we'll flag brand colors that can't pass contrast and propose digital-only alternates that keep your identity intact.
A content strategist takes your existing content apart and reassembles it into a structure people can navigate, which usually means flattening a deep navigation that has been burying your best material. This work sits upstream of SEO, because optimization only pays once the structure is sound.
Every engagement opens the same way: discovery interviews with your stakeholders, then a facilitated workshop that puts the decisions in one room. Our approach draws on the design anthropologist Dori Tunstall's idea of respectful design, which uses expertise to support the choices a community makes for itself rather than imposing order from outside. In practical terms that means four commitments.
We design with you, and we bring your stakeholders into the decisions rather than presenting them with conclusions.
Content, structure, and visual design are one thing to the person using the site, so we treat them as one thing while we make it.
There is no big reveal. You'll have Figma access, shared staging, documented sign-offs at every phase, and a weekly written status note.
The system we design is built to evolve with your organization instead of requiring reinvention every few years.
Our strategy lead interviews the people who own the outcome and the people who live with the current site, separately, because they rarely describe the same problem. Where your audience is reachable we talk to them too, and you get the findings in writing rather than as a summary slide.
Two hours with everyone in the room at once, covering brand attributes, competitive position, content priorities, and the audiences we are designing for. Pre-work goes out ahead of the session so the time gets spent on decisions rather than introductions. One exercise establishes who you are not, which tends to be more clarifying than establishing who you are.
Our strategy lead synthesizes research and discovery into the brief that governs everything after it: goals, audiences, and the specific opportunities in your brand positioning and user experience.
We collaborate with your team on the sitemap, the content model, and low-fidelity wireframes, accounting for site-wide patterns and for what your authors need from the CMS.
Two directions, presented as partial page compositions or mood boards depending on how far the brand conversation has come. You pick one, and we develop it.
The selected direction becomes a component system, reviewed as pages and then broken down into its parts for engineering.
We don't hold design and front-end development apart, and we don't wait for design to be finished before engineering starts. You'll see progress in Figma and on staging while it's in motion, which is where the useful feedback happens.
We designed a full component library in Figma, incorporated their team's feedback into the library itself rather than into one-off page designs, and handed over a design system sheet their internal team now works from. Their marketing team launches new pages without us.
We designed and built the iOS and Android apps behind that, using Tap to Pay and Stripe Connect. Happy Cog is a Stripe Premier Partner, and Stripe brings us into their most complex enterprise implementations.
Our audit covered 56 templates and 52 stylesheets, found 60 issues against WCAG 2.2 AA, identified the three patterns causing most of them, and delivered a three-sprint remediation plan plus automated axe-core scanning to keep regressions from coming back.
Higher education, publishing, law, consumer brands, and nonprofits. Each case study covers the research, the design decisions, and what happened after launch.
A higher ed website beyond convention.
Editorial tools for C-suite disruption.
Driving donations through utility and discovery.
An engaging user experience for a top Silicon Valley firm.
Customizing your experience and your room.
Keeping a hopeful eye on climate futures.
No, and we'd often argue against it. If your traffic and revenue concentrate on a handful of templates, we can design a system for those first, ship it, and roll the rest through as budget allows. A phased approach also gives you real performance data before the larger investment.
Yes, and it's a common arrangement. Sometimes we design the system and your team builds pages from it. Sometimes your designers own the brand and bring us in for research, information architecture, or the interior application screens. We've also worked inside client Figma organizations under their tooling policies, so the operational side of that is familiar.
Both, including the parts of an app that never appear in a portfolio. We design onboarding, account settings, permissions, payment flows, offline states, and error handling for iOS and Android, and we build them too.
WCAG 2.2 Level AA is included in every design and build we do. Our accessibility specialist reviews designs and tests manually, and we'll tell you early if a brand color can't pass contrast so you have time to decide what to do about it. Remediating an existing site is separate work, and we do that as well.
Figma, with shared access from the start. You'll see work in progress instead of a polished presentation at the end, and every phase closes with a documented sign-off so nobody is surprised later about what was agreed.
We start with a short conversation about your goals, your audiences, your current platform, and who's on your team, then propose a phased scope with hours by role. Scope varies a great deal with the number of templates, the state of your content, and how much of the work your team wants to own, so we'd rather talk it through than quote a package.
Strategy sets the audiences, the priorities, and the measures of success that the design brief inherits. When both live with one team, the design stops being a debate about preference.
The same people who design your site build it, on Craft, WordPress VIP, Laravel, Shopify, or a headless architecture with a React front end. Happy Cog is a WordPress VIP Premier Partner and a Craft Verified Partner with the Craft, Commerce, and Enterprise designations.
Information architecture, heading structure, and page templates are search decisions before they're design decisions. Our SEO team is in the room during structure work, which is when it's cheap to get right and long before it becomes a migration project.
Our analytics engineers instrument the design as it's built, so the new site launches on a clean GA4 baseline with the interactions that matter to your business tracked. That's what makes the next round of design decisions evidence rather than opinion.
Campaign landing pages built inside your design system convert better than orphaned pages built outside it, and they let our paid media team test messaging without waiting on a design queue.
When an AI feature belongs in your product, someone has to design what it looks like when the model is uncertain, when it's wrong, and when a person needs to take over. We design those states as part of the interface.
Send us the site or app you have now and what's not working about it. We'll come back with a point of view, and if we're not the right studio for the project we'll say so.
