Bryan especially is a vinyl connoisseur and has a collection that rivals that of most record stores. More often than not you can find him wandering around Som Records over on 14th street on his lunch breaks. While he’s snagged some great and popular finds there in the past (the mono version of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper being one of his most recent lucky purchases), it’s also not uncommon for him to seek out weird records no one’s ever heard of.

So when he came back the other day with “an early 70s release from one of the leaders of Brazil’s tropicália movement” and “an afro rhythms record with an awesome thumb piano track” we weren’t all that surprised. Apparently you can’t go wrong with Montego Joe and Gilberto Gil, though the rest of us honestly have no idea who those people are. The sleeves have some nice hand lettering and interesting printing techniques though! I guess that counts for something.

In real news, we’re working on some fun masks and invitations for the upcoming AIGA DC Continuum Fund event, so we’re knee deep in elaborate sketches and zorro masks here in the studio. We’re all really looking forward to the event and hope to see a lot of folks there!

Are you a kick-ass designer looking to get your start in the industry? Do your HTML and CSS skills rock proverbial socks? Are you a fun, laid back, dedicated and creative design / code monkey? Is this possibly a picture of you?

Then we want you to become a member of the ripe team! We’re currently looking for a talented, entry level front-end developer / designer. While our immediate need is for someone to help us code websites (or, as you’ll soon be calling them “wobsites” – ripe humor is based almost entirely around mispronunciation), we’re looking for someone who can grow into a full fledged designer role. If you’re a regular reader of our blog you may have noticed that while we’ve been growing over the past couple of years we don’t hire all that often… so this is a great chance for a lucky young designer to become a part of our team.

So if you or someone you know is a talented designer with solid web chops and is looking to join a fun, award winning, super-green, super-awesome studio, you should click here and apply! If you’re lucky, some day we might be taking a picture of you in front of the green wall.

Bryan also donned his poster-making hat again this week, coming up with a new addition in what we’re now calling the Lindsay Buckingham Palace series. One of the opening acts in their upcoming show is called “Okinawa,” so we have our redcoat “Buckingham Palace” representative helping out a U.S. soldier with a fun summertime pig roast during some downtime in a battle.

And no week at ripe would be complete without us geeking out over some sort of food.  We ended the week with strawberry and rosemary scones and chocolate haystacks made by Senior Designer Ian’s mother (thanks, Mom!), home made mac n’ cheese a la Tomas with a zucchini side, and a birthday cake for Ellen (happy birthday!).

And no ripe-food-post would be complete without a recipe, so here’s Ian’s mom’s recipe for…

Chocolate Haystacks

• 11oz bag of milk chocolate morsels
• 11oz bag of butterscotch morsels
• 6oz (more or less) of chow mein noodles

Directions: Melt butterscotch and chocolate morsels in double boiler.  Crunch up chow mein noodles just a little so that the noodles aren’t too long (or else they’ll be hard to scoop).  Once the butterscotch and chocolate is melted, dump the chow mein noodles in and take it off the stove. Mix it all together.  Then spoon the mixture onto a cookie sheet that’s lined with parchment paper and let cool.  Add sprinkles to top before it’s completely cool if you want an extra dash of color. Yields around 20-24 pieces.

If you’re anything like me, whenever you think of the Big Apple you can’t help but think of big design. Having spent the past 9 months in New York City has allowed me to have my cake and eat it too! My work time is spent designing with my favorite creatives at ripe, and my free time allows for roaming the streets, galleries and museums of America’s great city.

Awhile back Tomas and I went to a preview of the documentary film Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. Among the many rich moments in the life of the “big” designer, teachings at the MFA Design program at SVA – which he does to this day – lit something within him that resonated with me. After a cascade of symbolic and meaningful moments, I decided that the program, also known as Designer as Author, was something I wanted to be a part of.

As those of you who’ve been there know, applications can be beastly and the most important story for any designer is told through their portfolio. Updating your portfolio is an organic and ever-evolving process. When it came to refreshing mine, achieving a timeless and engaging design was my main objective. An over-designed portfolio distracts from the work that should be shining in all its glory. With this idea in mind, I created a portfolio that is essentially a folder for my work with beautiful photography to show pieces in context.

Assembling my portfolio was much like making a book. Pages were mounted back to back with Pantone papers in between for the folder areas. It was painstaking and there were plenty of do-overs, but the final product is leagues beyond the plastic sheets that came with the portfolio – at least I would like to think so.

While, I didn’t end up needing my printed portfolio to get into the program (they review digital slides), simply presented work that speaks on it’s own played a big part in getting me closer to that MFA!

Earlier in the week we greeted our new summer intern Ellen (who we met back at the MICA Internship + Career Fair back in April, she had a great portfolio).  She’s already become a super productive member of the studio.  And of course no one ever really becomes a member of our studio without being shoved in front of the green wall to have a photo taken first…  Welcome to ripe, Ellen!

Communication is a big deal for us here in the studio and we use a bunch of tools to help us communicate not only with our clients, but internally as well.  Tomas and Bryan talked up two of our favorite project management tools – Basecamp and Highrise.  For the uninitiated, Basecamp is a tool that helps you keep track of project to-do’s, timelines, files, messages and a whole bunch of other stuff. It plays a huge role in our day to day studio affairs.  Additionally, we give all of our clients access to their project on Basecamp so they can check in to see what we’re doing whenever they like – transparency and all that jazz.

Highrise is more client management than project management but it also plays a vital role in our communication. It’s basically a big contact database with some robust features that help us keep all our emails, calls and meetings with clients cataloged and organized.  For example, it has a handy drop box address you can BCC on emails you send to clients.  Highrise will then automagically attach a copy of your email to the client’s section of the database in case you ever need to reference it later.  Handy!

Besides chatting about the various tools we use, Tomas and Bryan also talked with the students about our mood board process (which we’ve blogged about previously).  This process not only helps create better brands, it also communicates important information to a client and helps the client communicate their ideas and desires to us.

And after all that talk about communication we got to our favorite part: looking at student work!  The class was diverse in their talents, so we got to see some great motion graphics along with print and web design and even some fine art projects.

Our thanks to instructor Camden Richards for inviting us!  Camden works at Pixels & Ink so her students have been getting real-world wisdom all semester, but we’re sure points really hit home when you hear them over and over from different sources. We hope we reinforced a lot of Camden’s lessons.

While there’s a whole story about how Tomas went hungry for a week at some point back in the 80’s to buy this kettle (which we still use here in the studio to this day), we won’t go into that now. The point of all this is simple: Alessi makes some pretty stuff, and we like pretty stuff.  We had the opportunity recently to do some work with them, specifically with their newly opened store in Cady’s Alley in Georgetown. It’s the first Alessi store in DC, so we were excited to hear about it opening and were even more excited when we were asked to help them with some work for their grand opening party.  We had to rush (we had two days to get business cards printed and a temporary splash page launched), but we were able to get everything done in time.

Tomas spent the evening on Thursday at the grand opening party.  He was able to chat with Alessio Alessi Anghini (who agreed that the kettle is indeed extremely pretty), and generally tried to figure out ways to spend all our money on shiny office-wares.  The store is open now, so if you’re like us and enjoy pretty things, go and check it out.

We also spent a good deal of time this week doing a whole lot of hand-lettering for an upcoming project.  It’s always an interesting process, as we all have extremely different styles here in the studio.  Tomas writes about as neatly as is humanly possible, Maryam as minisculely, Bryan as left-handed-scrawlingly, and Ian as uncaringly, so we’ve got our bases covered.  For this project we initially presented Bryan’s aforementioned left-handed scrawl to the client, but they found it too sloppy.  We then presented the polar opposite (Tomas), but it was too neat and constrained.  Our goal was to preserve the energy of Bryan’s stroke while maintaining the legibility of Tomas’.

So we came up with a Frankenstein approach, which seemed appropriate with Halloween coming up.  Bryan scratched out the headlines in his looping, sloped script, and Tomas followed up by tracing over them. The result was some hand-lettering that had both spontaneity and sophistication.  All in all it was an interesting process (of writing the same thing over and over and over and over again, so really not all that interesting).

A big group of us headed over to the festival last Saturday.  The SMITH Commons crew had a great crowd and was busily making burgers and shrimp out on the grill (some of the best we’ve ever had), serving beer and giving passersby tours of the soon-to-open restaurant.  We have to say, we didn’t envy Chef Frederik and his new partner in crime, Chef Alexander.  It was a perfectly beautiful day, but standing out in the sun right next to a hot grill for hours on end didn’t look too fun.  However the food turned out great, so we suppose their suffering was justified.

The night before Tomas and our buddy Jenn from JML Marketing + Communications attended what Tomas called a “magical circus” over at Gallery O on H, also (obviously) on H Street.  The fojol bros. were there with their acrobatic entourage, in addition to a slew of musicians, jugglers and other crazy acts.  It was a fun, albeit slightly surreal evening.  The OonH has a lot of great artists who use found objects in their work.  The result is some really stunning pieces.

In other news Tomas actually just got back a few hours ago from the Washington Business Journal’s Green Business Awards (which we mentioned a few posts ago).  If you’ll remember, we were nominated and then selected as a finalist in the workplace category.

We didn’t win, but the real reward for us being included in such a great group of forward thinkers (our competition). The winner in our category, WSP Environment & Energy, set up a great voluntary carbon tracking program for their employees that rewards people who reduce their carbon footprint with a financial bonus.  If they don’t, it requests a payment (the money from the payments go to charity).  Pretty nifty system!

While it was a fun event and a great opportunity to meet other green business leaders in the area, honestly our hope is that some day competitions like the Green Business Awards no longer need to exist.  It’d be great to live in a world where sustainable business practices are so commonplace that rewarding people for being green would be as silly as rewarding them for not spending the entire day playing solitaire on their computers.  And that’s not just us being bitter (we swear).

Simple, colorful design is prevalent throughout Europe.. probably because it’s one of the clearest ways to communicate with a multilingual audience (more on this later).  However, again the contrast between the old and the new is vivid.  When you spend as much time as I did visiting historic sites and museums, viewing mosaics, neo-classical paintings, maestàs, ancient sculptures and ruins, your mind gets lost in a sea of ornate backgrounds and muted tones.  Bold, clean design provides a refreshing contrast and helps differentiate itself.

And besides that, simple design serves another extremely important purpose that’s much more utilitarian in nature.  Western Europe has… wait for it… 230 languages!  Sure, many are obscure, and English is a fairly common second language, but there’s still a great need for a common visual language.  This challenge has led to the invention of many clever symbols such as those below.