Crispin Porter + Bogusky's appropriation of the Colorado state flag.

For a minute I thought my phone was vibrating. Then I realized it was the air.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s Boulder office was literally buzzing when I visited last Tuesday along with my fellow Boulder Digital Works students, the program’s coordinators and one of our interns.

We rode some of their low rider bikes around the entry area, watched a dog piss on a pole and got the grand tour of the place that we had been hearing so much about during the previous six weeks.

The tour was an eye opener. There were people everywhere. In much of Colorado’s Front Range people don’t have big yards so they head to parks, open space and trails to spend time outdoors. At CP+B, a similar principle seems to apply.

All but the top dogs have insignificant workspaces. This spreads people all over the warehouse space to work. There were people on the patio, in the kitchen, in the entry, on the bleachers and everywhere in between.

They call it a factory and in a lot of ways it looks like one. The ducts in the ceiling are exposed, the floor is a smooth grey and there is plenty of exposed plywood. A second “floor” was added as the office grew from the original 40 that started in Boulder to the hundreds there now.

We saw familiar faces, checked out their 3-D printers used for product prototyping and finished our day with a two hour session in one of the conference rooms learning about account management with Acct. Manager Jeff Graham.

Throughout the session footsteps above were audible and outside a constant smattering of voices could be heard. The mildly chaotic scene was a stark contrast from life at Boulder Digital Works.

Things at BDW are relaxed, safe and quiet, like a womb. Seeing that real world out there was important. But equally as important was hitting the snooze button on that wake up call, knowing we have another year to try, trip, fail, succeed, experiment and dream within our safe training grounds at BDW.