It’s been a super-busy week here at ripe. We find that business generally picks up towards the end of the year, with some people trying to spend the rest of their annual budgets and others trying to get a project launched before the new year. We’re happy to do the work, but December tends to become a bit chaotic!

However we took a break from the chaos this morning to give two GMU students a tour of the studio.  Erik Hansen, a professor over at GMU, has been one of our buddies for awhile. He’s a talented guy who we worked with on a project years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Awhile back he invited Tomas to come out to GMU for a portfolio review and to speak about presenting yourself professionally as a designer, and he’s been pestering us to let a couple of his students come tour the studio for ages. We finally relented and told him we’d be happy to show his students around as long as they showed up at 9:00 sharp… Making terminally-sleep-deprived students get up early seemed like a good way to judge their level of sincerity.

Turns out that his students passed our test, as Heather and Lindsey came knocking on the studio door bright and early this morning. We chatted with them about our design process, showed them some mood boards and early logo sketches for a couple of projects, and then spent a good hour or so answering all their various questions. It’s easy for us to forget how complex running a studio can be and how little of the business side of things gets taught in school.  For example, as a student you never really learn how important client relations, contracts and time management is in design… you’re too busy learning theory and improving your craft! (which, of course, are both incredibly important)

Hopefully we were able to give Heather and Lindsey a good idea of what it’s like to work in a studio on a day-to-day basis – they certainly had a lot of great questions. Thanks for visiting!