After the gala, we followed up with an insert honoring the night’s big winners in the Washington Business Journal:

All in all it was a great night – congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone from the AMA board members to the sponsors and the vendors who all helped make everything such a success!

One of the many items we discussed in between mouthfuls of tasty Humboldt Fog (which is simply the best cheese) was our social media strategy. Being a small studio, blogging, tweeting, pinning and bookfacing all falls to members of our creative team which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s nice because it gives folks a way to interact with us directly instead of some PR go-between, but it can be a bit of a drain on our limited resources. Thus, as part of our social media strategy moving forward we’ll be focusing a bit more on other platforms and a little less on the blog.

What does this mean? Well the good news is that we’ll be making more meaningful posts in the near future (you can expect some new work posts in the coming weeks!) but we’ll no longer be making This Week @ ripe posts. In fact, you’re reading the last one right now. It’s been a wild ride these past two and a half years, but all good things come to an end.

If you’d like to keep up with the more personal side of the studio, we’d encourage you to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter – we’re active on both! We’re also relatively active on Pinterest which we use for mood boarding.

We’ve really enjoyed writing these posts and hope you’ve enjoyed reading them! So good bye from This Week @ ripe (and the Muppets).

Being a graphic designer I have always been drawn to letterforms, and the different ways and techniques that exist to create them. I had played around with pointed pen calligraphy myself, but was never really convinced that I was doing everything correctly. There was always some part of me going, “Is this really the way I’m supposed to hold the pen? How often should I dip into the ink? Why doesn’t this look magical and perfect and like Michele Hatty Fritz?!” It turns out, it’s because I was doing it wrong… and because I’m not a professional calligrapher.

The good news is, even though I was doing everything wrong, I learned how to do it less wrong and everything started looking a lot better. I learned that you don’t write in the same way you would write regular cursive in one fluid motion. Instead, you build your letters in a completely different format, sometimes starting from the bottom to the top, sometimes left to right. This change was initially jarring, but after an hour or two of practice the motions came far more naturally. And in terms of dipping your pen in the ink? You do it, ALL the time. In the end, I spent more time dipping than writing, but truthfully, it makes a pretty dramatic difference.

I left the class with a bag full of goodies and supplies that came as part of the class, and immediately went home to practice. While I am certainly still getting the hang of it, I think someone somewhere was on to something when they said practice makes perfect. There is a follow-up intermediate calligraphy class that given a couple more weeks… okay months, I may just have to take!

We revealed a sneak peek a few posts back, but we’ve done a lot more than just some event signage. A website reskin is currently out for review, and just recently we snagged a bunch of samples of their stationery system which you can check out in the images below. However our favorite piece has to be their business cards.

Our buddy Joe C (who you’ll remember from about a million previous posts) went to one of their meetings a few months ago to do head shots for all the various board members and sent us copies in case we needed them for anything. A few weeks later when we were all sketching ideas for business cards AMA asked if we could incorporate those head shots in somehow. We were hesitant at first because often pictures on business cards can seem a little cheesy and awkward. As Shannon puts it, it’s kind of weird to go, “Here, have a picture of my face,” the first time you meet someone.

However as we were sketching Shannon came up with a great version where she applied a nifty dot treatment to the images. We all fell in love with the concept immediately and presented it to AMA with our fingers crossed. Happily enough they loved it as well! And we have to give credit where credit’s due – having a portrait on your business card is actually pretty functional, so good call AMA. Whenever you go to a networking event you usually come away with dozens of business cards, so having a little visual reminder of who you were talking to is super handy.

Also, while producing the cards we learned that this dot treatment literally makes anyone look like a badass. Really. Anyone in the world. For proof, here’s Bert & Ernie before and after:

Badasses. Though one could argue that they were already badasses.

Anyhow, we’ll be attending AMADC’s upcoming 80th Anniversary Top Marketer Awards Gala on October 25th – we’d recommend checking it out if you’re in the area!

Before

The site came in looking a little plain. Ready-made Wordpress templates can be great in the short-term just to get a site up, but if you’re selling a stylish product, your site should probably reflect that. We were thrilled at the opportunity to help when Salon Bleu gave us a call.

After

Salon Bleu went from just-another-Wordpress-site to a head-turning HTML 5 site. We had our photographer/videographer friend Joe C drop by McLean to shoot some video that we used in the background. One of the most exciting things about HTML5 is its capacity for video, which dynamically resizes itself depending on how large you have your browser window open.

Now Salon Bleu has a beautiful website to match the amazing hairstyles their stylists create! Come to think of it, we’re feeling a little shaggy over here…

There’s an old trolley station underneath Dupont Circle that’s been abandoned since the 1960s. A couple years ago, some of our friends organized the Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground in the hopes of transforming the station into a unique place for the public to enjoy the arts. We were on board right away and donated a website to give the movement a little visual pizazz. Tomas headed over to their “Dupont Underground Aboveground” fundraiser over in Eastern Market the other day – there was music, art, and good times all around, and it’s been exciting to see the movement continue to pick up steam.

In other news, Tomas and Ian took another trip down to the HHMI offices today and we got a ton of samples of the work we’ve been doing for eLife, our open-access scientific publishing pals. HHMI actually stands of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, so they have a giant painting of old Howard looking dapper:

The goodies:

It’s going to take us awhile to unpack these boxes! We’ve done magnets, stickers, shirts, banners, postcards, business cards, posters, and even more. In the meantime, we’re still cranking out new designs for eLife; stay tuned for more soon!

And this week it called for it. Regular readers of our blog and clients who have visited the studio already know ripe lives in a 100+ year old row house in Logan Circle. This is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing in that we’ve got a kickass roof deck and an all around cool space to work in, but a curse in that it’s an old (verging on “olde”) building, and old buildings often need things replaced. We’ve been needing some new windows for a long while (we still have the original 100 year old windows with wavy glass!), so today ripe is getting a bunch of fancy new ones installed. Not only are they going to look great, but they’ll help us cut down on our energy use which’ll reduce our carbon footprint.

While Tomas has spent a hectic day in the studio helping the contractors, Bryan, Ian and Shannon have spent the day working from home. So just for the heck of it we decided to do a window-themed blog post this week. What do the three of us see out our windows when we wake up in the morning? What helps us wake up inspired and ready to create?

Well it’s dramatically different for each of us. Bryan and Shannon both live in apartments in DC while Ian lives in a tall highrise in Rosslyn. Bryan and Ian are both lucky enough to have pretty great light streaming in through their windows, so they happily keep them open most of the time. But what about Shannon… what is she hiding behind those blinds?

A not-so-pretty view, unfortunately. Shannon lives right smack in the middle of DC, so she doesn’t have much to look at besides a somewhat uninteresting alley. On the other hand, Bryan somehow managed to find an apartment that backs up against Rock Creek Park, so it’s almost like he doesn’t live in the city at all. He often sees raccoons, owls, woodpeckers and other wildlife moseying about in the forest. Ian, being up on the 12th floor, gets to look out over Arlington. Granted he mostly just sees other big buildings, but he gets some pretty great sunsets.

And what do we all see at ripe?

Well, at the moment not a whole lot… they’re still installing the windows! And that’s it for this week. We’re wrapping up a bunch of projects and coming out from under a bunch of tight deadlines, so stay tuned for some new work and perhaps less inane blog posts in the coming weeks!

1. Flipping Typical

Have you ever sat around trying to come up with the perfect font for a new brand? We think flipping typical is one of the neatest (and free-est) tools around!

2. Wood Type Revival

Playing around with different wood types is always a good time. We’ve found that this site has some of the best ones out there, designed from revived wood blocks!

3. The Noun Project

A collaborative project where the goal is to create an icon for every noun… ever. Either use one of the beautifully designed ones on the site, or create your own – what could be more fun?

We hope everyone has a fabulous holiday!

We’re even managing to squeeze some road trips in during work hours. Ian had a field trip on Monday to Chevy Chase, Maryland. We’ve been working with eLife for months now (see our post from May for a summary), and HHMI, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a big supporter of their mission to make scientific research more accessible for everyone. Although it feels like it’s out in the countryside, their leafy campus is just a few blocks from downtown Chevy Chase. Ian found himself out-geeked as he was surrounded by developers and coders from exotic and nerdy locales like Palo Alto and Canada. We asked him what they talked about all day, but we didn’t really understand his answer. In fact, we’re suspicious that he just spent the entire day climbing HHMI’s crazy shape-shifting robo-rock-wall (which they apparently have?)

We’re still combing through all the great shots that Joe C, Tomas, and Shannon got at the SEED school in Baltimore a week ago. Did we find the perfect cover shot? Well, you be the judge:

It’s a beautiful place, to say the least. Tomas always makes a practice of sending us pictures whenever he’s out of the studio (we can’t decide if he’s being nice and giving us blog-fodder or if he’s taunting us), but he outdid himself this time by sending along a batch of photos of a stunning sunset which we stitched together in Photoshop to create a panorama. Click the image below for a big version!

We don’t know about you, but we’d like to be there right now. He also apparently spent a bunch of time riding his family’s horses and sent along another photo of his new buddy Spirit happily rolling around in the grass after a long ride.

In real news – we’re hard at work on a slew of projects including the 2012 annual report for our long time client, the SEED Foundation. We’ve had a blast working on it in previous years, and one of our favorite parts of the process is art directing photo shoots. The kids at SEED are simply fantastic to work with (which makes for a fun day), but being there to offer some direction is always super helpful down the road. The greatest shots we’ve gotten over the past two years all came from close collaborations with SEED’s photographer. Our pal Joe C is doing the shoot again this year, and we can’t wait to see the results.

So while Bryan and Ian are holding down the fort, Tomas and Shannon are up at the SEED school in Baltimore as we speak. Tomas sent along this snapshot of Shannon taking pictures of the kids at an assembly… Apparently one of the nice thing about being a grown up is you don’t have to pay attention at assemblies anymore!