As far as mysteries go, the meaning of life rates a 10. How they get the peanut butter in the jar in the first place rates a 9, and the success of The Chopping Block (U.S) a 9.5.

Chaos couldn't find a more comfortable home than there. One wall is painted bright orange, and desks are cluttered with tech gadgets. Staff members are so addicted to inside jokes, they've set up a special computer called Choptalk. With a pair of speakers and an instant messenger account, it booms good-natured insults all day long.

"Sometimes we hire people and they come in here and take advantage of the environment and do nothing," says Rob Reed, "but they don't last long."

That's because the Block is a place where design gets done. Founded in 1996 by Cooper Union grads Reed, Matt Richmond, Mike Essl, and Tom Romer, the firm has dramatically raised its profile in the last year or so. It has built a number of noted sites such as Buyarock.com (U.S), Scream3 (U.S) (for the movie of the same name) and the Phish Farmhouse (U.S), which won Best Design at Flashforward2000 in New York.

"People come to us because they want us to do our own thing," says Richmond. "The more freedom they give us, the more stuff we put into a site."

In its projects, the firm tends to take a hokey Americana theme and beat it to a humorous death. The Scream 3 site, for example, ended up as a history of a fake film studio, complete with dozens of phony B-movie posters. Buyarock.com has Buyarock security guards and Buyarock vans. The Block's own site (U.S), which depicts the staff as orange farmers, is chock-full of surprises. Mouse over the wreaths of innocent-looking flowers, and they bloom larger and start to rotate. Click on a little bird and you hear chirping. Pass over a tractor and it starts spewing smoke.

"They have managed to bring their own take on the pop culture vernacular to their client work," says Warren Corbitt, a creative director at One9ine Studios (U.S). "It manages to balance the line between style and content in a truly unique way."

"Our site is campy," admits Rob Reed, "but there is some clever copy, some nice play between the objects, and the layout is always thought out. I think we pull off the campiness because it's designed well."

Rewarded and awarded, the firm chugs on. The staff now numbers 12 and is straining at the walls of its current offices. Asked what they're dreaming of next, Matt says, half-joking, "We'd like to become a design cult, where we do nothing but weird art projects all day long that nobody understands, but they all love us anyway." Later he becomes a bit more serious. "We're getting kind of old," he says. "There's this whole new generation coming up." He pauses. "Aaaah, we're becoming Designosaurs."