One thing we’ve found from working with caterers is that their clients are usually in a constant state of worry.  It’s hard to organize a large event, and it’s especially difficult if it’s not something you do on a day to day basis.  RSVP takes great pride in helping alleviate some of that worry.  During one of our first meetings out at RSVP’s headquarters, we stopped on our way out to examine the numerous framed letters on the wall.  All of them were thank you letters from RSVP’s clients, and they certainly had an impact.  It’s one thing to have a company tell you they’ll take care of everything… it’s quite another to hear the company’s clients say the same thing.  For this reason, we gave these client quotes high priority on the layout.

RSVP also had a bunch of great photography lying around which we were eager to show to their prospective clients.  Thus, rotating diptychs and triptych are employed on every page, ensuring that a client is always seeing a fresh image.

Anyhow, we’re glad to have the site up and running!  Give it a look and let us know what you think.

We’ve also recently launched a couple new websites, one of which is RSVP Catering.  We wrote a whole blog post about the site which we’ll be posting early next week.  But feel free to check out the new site in the meantime!

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.

Our intrepid intern Christina finished her stint at ripe and headed back to school for her final year.  We’re sorry to see her go – she was a great addition to the team – but her leaving gave us the perfect excuse to have a going-away dinner at Ted’s Bulletin.  Christina was dying to try them and had been for some time, so the ripe team spent an evening enjoying breakfast for dinner, meatloaf, some of the biggest onion rings we’d ever seen, and of course, adult milkshakes.  We recommend the Mocha Kahlua, Grasshopper and White Russian – mmmm, tasty.

A few days later Senior Designer Maryam, having finished gallivanting across Europe for her honeymoon, deigned to visit the studio.  It sounds like she had a fantastic trip and we’re all extremely jealous.  And apparently there’s nothing like a little trip to the continent to replenish your creative juices.  Maryam came back with a camera bursting with pictures of classic art and architecture alongside modern design.  She’s written a whole blog post about it which we’ll be releasing in a few days.

A new restaurant coming to H Street in the near future, SMITH Commons is a fantastic concept that we can’t wait to see open.  We actually went the menu tasting awhile back, and SMITH’s chef, Frederik De Pue (who you might remember from our posts about 42° – his catering business), created some amazingly tasty dishes.  While we can’t really discuss all of the intricacies of the menu at this point, lets just say that we went home stuffed not only because that’s generally how one leaves a tasting (there’s always so much food!), but because we couldn’t stop ourselves from taking seconds and thirds.  Anyone who has ever been to a tasting will tell you this is foolish – after all, how can you expect to taste every single dish on the menu if you eat more than a bite of each – but we couldn’t help ourselves.  So good…

Anyway, Bryan and Tomas visited the restaurant which is still under construction and met up with Sheldon of SMITH Commons to consult on the environmental design.  They spent some time discussing the second floor patio…

and then chatted awhile about the interior…

It’s all a little rough around the edges at the moment and very much under construction, but it’s starting to come together which is always an exciting process.  To keep up to date on what’s happening with SMITH and for some more pictures, feel free to check out their temporary blog – smithcommonsdc.com.  We’ll have the full site up and running soon!

Later in the week we received an interesting email from the Washington Business Journal – it appears we were nominated for their Green Business Awards and were selected as a finalist!  We didn’t even know we’d been nominated in the first place!  They’ll be announcing the winners at a special breakfast at the Willard Intercontinental on the 24th of September, so keep your fingers crossed for us.  (Our name is down in the lower right hand corner… we apparently have to beat out the US General Services Administration which may be a bit tough )

In other news, it’s Friday the 13th which means a whole bunch of us will be watching horror movies tonight.  Some of the movies on our list: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which you can watch for free here – oh Internet Archive, we love you), Rosemary’s Baby, 28 Days Later (one of the best zombie movies of all time), and, of course, Army of Darkness, which really isn’t a horror movie, but is awesome anyway.

We particularly love watching screen printing as it’s very different than traditional printing. The biggest difference is visibility: with screen printing, the machines are open so you can directly view every step.  With sheetfed offset printing, which is how most things (business cards, letterhead, etc) are printed, the presses are massive machines that obscure pretty much the entire process.  While our profession and indeed the world in general is becoming more digital and less physical every day, it’s refreshing to watch ink being applied to paper, or in this case, cloth.

And speaking of refreshing, Tomas decided to take a much deserved mini-vacation last weekend.  While visiting his family in New York state, he sent the following email to various studio members who were stuck inside while it rained in DC:

From the back of a three year old Tennessee Walker mare in western, upstate NY. Venison steak tonight, bon-fire afterwards with some tasty booze. Blackberry picking tomorrow.

And of course, if that wasn’t enough, he taunted us with pictures.

In other news, our new Design Manager Tig has been out and about making the rounds at various networking events around town.  One event he attended (and enjoyed in particular) was an AMA (American Marketing Association) event which took place at Sushi Rock (music plays when you click) in Arlington.  The rest of us are all big sushi fans… maybe we’ll have to start networking more too.

He and Senior Designer Ian grew up together out in Colorado, and he’s always been around to lend a hand when we get a little overwhelmed with web projects.  However he’s been talking about moving away from the front-end development side of the business and towards the project and client management side for awhile now.  A few months ago we began thinking about hiring someone for just that type of position, so we asked him if he might be interested in more of a permanent gig with ripe.  It’s nice when things work out like that!

So a big welcome to our new Design Manager, Tig!  He’s already had a pretty busy week – getting to know his way around the studio, attending a couple of networking events and meeting clients.  He’ll be out and about at events a whole bunch in the near future, so if you see him out on the town, give him a hard time for us.

We also launched a new website this week – Taylor Gourmet’s website to be exact.  We wrote a whole blog post about it a couple days ago, but we didn’t discuss anything too technical.  So why not discuss that now!  Note: If you don’t care about technical Flash issues, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

One of our favorite parts of the site is actually one least visible elements – deep linking.  This practice has been around for awhile now and it’s amazing how many Flash developers still fail to use it when they’re creating a full Flash site.  What’s deep linking you ask?  Well, when a site is done completely with Flash there’s never a page change, meaning the URL (that’s the thing in your address bar that currently says http://www.ripe.com/blog/…) never changes.  Why is this an issue?  What if you wanted to share a specific page with a friend?  On a traditional website you could simply copy and paste that URL into an email and send it off and your friend could then easily look at the same page.  Flash, however, does not change the URL as all of the changes take place within the Flash movie, and you never change actual pages.  SWFAddress is a handy little deep linking tool that provides a solution to this issue.  It makes the Flash movie interact with the URL in the address bar.  So, for example, if you want to send a Menu page link on Taylor Gourmet to your pal, you can send him this URL: http://www.taylorgourmet.com/#/Menu and he’ll go straight there as opposed to the landing page.  Pretty handy!  For those interested, here’s a great tutorial on how to integrate it into your Flash movie.  The SWFAddress site, sadly, does not have much documentation.

In other news, Tomas and Ian both recently bought new iPhone 4’s in spite of the whole “antennagate” fiasco.  In all honesty, neither of us have had any issues as of yet, but we have had fun attempting to use the front-facing cameras to comprehend infinity.

Our main goal with the website was to visually reproduce what makes Taylor so much more than just your average hoagie shop.  In our first meeting with the Taylor team we were blown away by the sheer number of different textures one finds in their restaurants – brushed concrete, re-purposed shipping pallets, hot-rolled steel and exposed brick to name a few.  Even during our first meeting (before the contract was even signed!), the site began to take shape in our minds.  By using the same textures in addition to other visual elements harvested directly from the restaurant, we think we’ve succeeded in creating a virtual space that feels like it could exist in the real world, and accurately reflects the look and feel of Taylor Gourmet.

Additionally, we thought it’d be fun to include some stop motion animation to give the site a little extra pizzazz.  While waiting for the site to load, visitors are treated to an animation showing the various steps that go into creating a Taylor hoagie, and there are other pieces of stop motion scattered across the site (with more soon to come post-launch).  All in all, we did our best to make each section of the site as unique and branded as possible.  The Press section, for example, isn’t just a list of links to articles, but rather clickable, movable, sortable news-clippings taped up on a wall.

So there you go – the new TaylorGourmet.com is up and running, go take a look!

The only problem with having a wonderfully massive monitor is that it’s hard to get a good wallpaper that actually fits, hence the reason why Bryan is still using the Snow Leopard default.  Guess he’ll have to make one.

For sometimes getting a bad rap from other designers, the iMac is actually a pretty sweet system.  A lot of designers out there swear by the burlier Mac Pro as it has a lot more upgradability. Our thought process was this – we usually buy laptops as they’re small, portable, but pack quite a bit of punch when it comes to processing power.  The iMac, by comparison, has pretty much the same if not better hardware, is dramatically cheaper, but lacks portability.  We were more than happy to sacrifice portability for huge monitors and equivalent or better hardware.  The only downside of not having a huge Mac Pro is that you can’t fill it with 32 GB of RAM or add extra hard drives.  However for day-to-day production machines, the iMac is perfect.  We’ll probably snag a Mac Pro at some point (we always like to have at least one ultra-burly computer in the studio in case we need to do any heavy rendering work), but for now everything with the iMac is going swimmingly.

When we asked Bryan to give us a quote about his new toy, we hoped he might say something like, “Wow, I’m so much more productive!”  Alas, no.  “I’m having fun breaking websites on purpose with absurdly large browser sizes.”  Thanks Bryan.

Also! College aged designers take note: ripe is accepting applications for our fall semester internship position.  For more info please view the job listing here, or read the blog post about it here, and start polishing up that portfolio!