Airbag Industries & Happy Cog Merge

August 03, 2009

In 2006, Greg asked me to join Airbag as its first employee. And last month marked the completion of my third year at Airbag. We’ve grown in size and in the scope of projects we work on. And now we’re growing some more.

I’m happy to announce that Airbag Industries and Happy Cog have merged.

From the press release:

The newly merged Happy Cog team will offer clients the benefits of a large firm—a wide range of skills, experience and industry leadership in web standards, information architecture, marketing, content strategy, and implementation of best practices, while at the same time bringing to the table the creativity, responsiveness, and out-of-the box thinking of a boutique Firm. All three studio locations can share design, development, user experience, and content strategy resources and personnel. Happy Cog East and Happy Cog West will specialize in client services, web design, and development. Happy Cog Studios in New York, while also designing select websites, will chiefly focus on business strategy and content publishing via Happy Cog’s industry-leading A List Apart Magazine (www.alistapart.com), An Event Apart web design conference, and other ventures.

It just makes a lot of sense. We enjoy working with each other, we enjoy socializing with each other, we enjoy standards-based design and development and customizing and deploying the wonderful ExpressionEngine CMS. In short, the Happy Cog and Airbag Industries teams couldn’t be more compatible.

We also have existing relations with Happy Cog: Greg has been a Happy Cog Strategic Partner for some time, I’m the Production Director of A List Apart Magazine and Ethan has spoken at several Happy Cog-produced An Event Apart conferences, works as a technical editor on A List Apart Magazine and is co-authoring the new edition of Jeffrey Zeldman’s book, Designing with Web Standards.

So, as of today, Airbag will go back to being Greg’s personal website, the place where this all started, and we begin our new adventure as Happy Cog West.