Tomas just got back into the studio from his business trip across the pond, and he brought some fun pictures along with him. Since we haven’t had a chance to do a real blog post about the client he was meeting with yet, we’ll just have to spoil the surprise – Tomas was meeting with the eLife team (whose brand and site we recently launched, check ‘em out).

eLife is a brand spankin’ new “research-driven initiative for the very best in science and science communication.” What does that mean? Well here’s the short version for the layman: they’re a new organization looking to mix things up in the scientific publishing field with their soon-to-come open-access scientific journal. Not sure what open-access is, or why it’s a big deal? We’d recommend reading this. (Hint: It’s a very good thing.) We’re having a blast working with them, and we’ll make a full blog post about the project at some point in the near future, promise!

Tomas spent most of this week in the UK traveling between London and Oxford, meeting with various members of the eLife marketing team. Unfortunately he didn’t really have much of a chance to do any sightseeing, but he still snapped a bunch of pictures.

Below: Nothing says “England” quite like rolling hills and lush, green grass as far as the eye can see.

Below: Tomas wasn’t able to spend much time wandering around London… Not only was he busy, but it was also (surprise!) pouring rain the whole time. However he did get out long enough to snap this shot which is amusingly ultra-British.

Below: According to Tomas the entire city is just covered in new construction projects, most of which have something to do with the coming Olympics. It’s an exciting time to be in London.

Below: After going through security at Heathrow Tomas spotted this little machine asking for feedback – pretty cool concept. (Dear TSA: maybe this is something you should look into, but perhaps reinforce your frowny face buttons).

And that, believe it or not, is it. Poor Tomas was so busy that he only had a few spare moments to wander around London and Oxford, so he didn’t really get a good taste for the country. However the upside is that we’re going to be doing a bunch more work with eLife, so hopefully we’ll be back!

Now excuse us while we get back to work… it’s a busy end to a busy week!

So what’s our response to said jitters? Getting the heck out of DC. Like we’ve mentioned before, we all play our roles in the studio… and those roles becomes incredibly obvious when you look at our individual summer activities. Bryan, the art lover (especially Andy Warhol), ventured up to New York to check out the Millenium Magazines exhibit at the MoMA. However like most trips to MoMA, he ended up stumbling across a whole slew of other exhibits that caught his fancy, including Andy Warhol’s cow wallpaper, and some nifty architectural models.

Tomas, being the creative director and business owner, plays the role of Mr. Busy Businessman. However that’s not always a bad thing – the lucky guy is heading out to the London next week for some business meetings, so maybe his role is really ripe’s international jet-setter. He’ll be there meeting with a client on a new project we’ve been working on for the past few months (it’s actually already launched, but we haven’t gotten around to blogging about it yet – next week, we swear!), but he’ll also be using the opportunity to see the sights and do the tourist thing in London.

Ian’s role is that of the outdoorsy guy, so instead of taking a vacation somewhere he decided to get back into one of his favorite sports – whitewater kayaking. Surprisingly enough, there’s a ton of awesome whitewater within three or four hours of DC, including some great rapids right below Great Falls. He hasn’t had a kayak since he moved to DC a decade ago, so he finally bit the bullet and bought a new one. He had a bunch of colors to choose from, but ended up going with plain red. Why? Well the answer is somewhat designerly (and somewhat ridiculous): “Because it matched my car.” Granted it’s not an exact match, but hey. Close enough.

And finally there’s Maryam, who’s been playing the student role up in New York for awhile now. She’s been working on her masters at SVA, but over the summer break she’ll actually be coming back to DC while the rest of us keep trying to get away from the city. We’re really looking forward to having her in town, partially so we can pick her brain about the program at SVA (we all wish we had Milton Glaser and Sagmeister as professors)! She’s been churning out some great work up there – check out her new and improved portfolio.

So that’s it for this week! We’re getting our summer on even though it’s not here yet.

A quick update regarding our junior designer search for all you applicants – we’re still working through a big old pile of resumes and portfolios, and are in the process of interviewing folks. We’ll (hopefully) be making a decision in the next few weeks. However we’re really picky, so who knows!

PS. Here’s a nice summer-themed song to end your day! Kat Edmonson is one of our favorite new discoveries.

Tomas and some visiting friends stopped by earlier in the week to see Doug Aitken’s installation “Song 1.” If you haven’t heard about it, you still may have seen it if you’ve driven through DC at night recently. It’s a huge video that’s wraps 360° around the building paired with an interesting mashup-remix of “I Only Have Eyes for You.” While it’s visually and acoustically stunning, there’s really nothing all that new and amazing about the technology. Anyone who’s been to Vegas or Times Square within the past decade or so would probably say, “well, so what? It’s just a big projection.”

While that’s true, the location really makes it shine (ignoring the content of the piece for a moment). Calling the area around the Hirshhorn a ghost town at night would be putting it mildly – there’s no one down there after dark. Surrounding the museum are several other branches of the Smithsonian, the Mall and a slew of government buildings, most of which shut down at night. It’s one of the few spots in the city where there’s not a whole lot of sound pollution besides the occasionally passing taxi, so the atmosphere created by the Song 1 feels a lot more powerful than it probably would elsewhere. It’s hard to do the piece justice without being there, but Aitken has made a pretty fantastic video that’ll give you a taste.

We’d highly recommend checking it out. It’ll be here through May 13th, so get on down to the Hirshhorn some time between sunset and midnight before then! Or, if you won’t be able to, the Washington Post has a pretty good write-up and photo gallery, and Doug Aitken’s site has a ton more images.

Of course that’s not what really happens… There are a million steps and a unique process in between that helps determine the quality and direction of the final product. That process is extremely important but it differs from person to person. We’re always interested in learning how different designers work, so when when the AIGA GMU chapter president asked Tomas to come and help judge their upcoming design battle, we jumped at the opportunity. For the uninitiated, a “design battle” is a live artistic competition where a bunch of designers are given a project with a specific theme and criteria and then produce a design based on said theme for a live audience. It’s a relatively new (and weird) concept, but we already love it and can’t wait to see more.

It was a pretty great event. There were five contestants and two rounds of elimination leading up to a final showdown between two students. As we mentioned previously, the students had to produce designs in a set amount of time based on specific themes and criteria. For example, the first round’s theme was “WTF,” and the criteria was that they could not use any photos or typography. After thirty minutes of hectic and speedy work, a group of local designers including Tomas would comment on each design and then fill out a secret ballot to choose who went on to the next round.

It was really interesting to see the different approaches each student took with the exact same project. Some would sit down and do some initial sketching to firm up their idea while others would hop right into Photoshop or Illustrator and being production. Others would spend a few minutes Googling for inspiration before settling into a groove.

But like Highlander, there could be only one (winner) and after three wonderfully chaotic rounds that winner was Joseph Le (who we’ve actually met a few times before at previous GMU events). “He was so fast,” Tomas commented to the rest of us in the studio the next day, “he’d just sit there doing nothing for a few moments and then he’d suddenly be working furiously for the next couple of minutes” They had pretty great prizes for all the contestants including a bunch of gift certificates from two of our clients (Taylor Gourmet and matchbox), which were really popular with the terminally hungry, I-survive-on-ramen-alone college students.

In addition to the design battle, there was also a huge wall dedicated to an open doodle contest. Anyone at the event could wander up to the wall and leave their mark, and people were able to vote for their favorite doodle with post-it notes. We thought that was a really nice touch as it gave the audience something to do besides just sitting there passively watching the competition.

All in all it was a fantastic event and we hope we get invited back next year. Congrats to Joseph and the rest of the contestants – you guys all did great work! Special thanks to AIGA GMU chapter president Adey Chaplin for letting us use her photos in this post, and a huge thanks to talented designer, GMU professor and buddy-o-ripe Eric Hansen for getting us involved with GMU in the first place (and for doing a great job MCing last night)!

Update 4/24: Looks like the oh-so-professional AIGA GMU chapter has a spiffy video of the event (courtesy Vinh Le)! Here it is:

Other news this week

Did you see the space shuttle Discovery flying over DC this week? We unfortunately missed it (which is ridiculous considering we had a perfect place from which to view it), but it lead us to an interesting post about the evolution of NASA’s logo on Logo Design Love – worth a read. Every logo should have a nickname like “the worm” or “the meatball.”

Our Junior Designer search is, of course, still ongoing (y u no apply?) – so here’s an update on the typeface popularity contest: Akzidenz Grotesk is still holding strong in first place with Archer, Futura and Gotham tied for second. Didot and Univers are trailing behind in third. Tobias Frere-Jones continues to be the only type designer anyone cares about by an extremely wide margin. See you next week!

We’ve had a really busy week, but Tomas still found time to do some work on our rooftop garden. As always we’ll be growing a bunch of super-spicy red peppers, but unfortunately that’s the only type of veggie that’ll survive up there – the squirrels eat everything else. Additionally, Tomas planted a whole bunch of ornamental grass and creeper seedlings he’s borrowed from some of our nice neighbors, so in a month or so we’ll be able to transplant them into our front yard. Below you’ve got some creeping red sedum along with a bunch of dwarf mondo grass.

And while we’ve been shut up indoors all winter, our compost pile has been busily turning our old apple cores and whatnot into rich, black soil. We left it alone a little too long in early spring, and some grass started to sprout in it (whoops), but it’s looking pretty good to us! Probably half of the compost is made up of old coffee grounds, so we’re wondering if our peppers are going to be strangely caffeinated this year…

That’s about it for this week – it’s been a busy one. A few quick notes: our junior designer posting is still active (so you can still apply if you like!), but we’re taking a break from updating the font popularity chart this week (see the previous weeks here and here). But for those interested, Akzidenz Grotesk has pulled into the lead, followed by Archer, Didot, Futura and Gotham. Tobias Frere-Jones is still dominating the designer field with 5 typefaces.

Also, Tomas is going to be judging the first ever AIGA GMU Design Battle next Thursday. It’s open to the public, so if you’d like to see some up and coming designers fight to the death with pixels and picas, we’d recommend checking it out! Say hello to Tomas if you see him!

First off, if you’re in DC and you haven’t checked it out yet – go now! It’s pretty impressive. Tomas and his family had a great time trying out some of the sample games (Flower was a big hit with his parents, and Tomas was able to put his Pac Man skills to use), and they also enjoyed all the additional installations and videos and whatnot. Particularly striking was a huge wall of old tube TV’s displaying awesome 8-bit artwork.

Video games are really coming into their own as an art form. Like most non-gamers, Tomas and his family were surprised at the wide breadth of genres out there… after all not every game involves shooting zombies or crashing cars. In fact, many games these days are not only creative and artistic, but they also allow you as the player to be creative and artistic (such as one of Ian’s favorites – Minecraft – which he’s trying to get the rest of the studio to play). Some companies are even creating games that are less entertainment-driven and more experience-driven, much like a piece of traditional art. Journey, another game by the makers of Flower immediately comes to mind.

It’s also pretty impressive to look at how far the technology has come. An interesting comparison is made in the video below – Pitfall, a twenty year old Atari game, and Uncharted are both Indiana Jones-like adventure stories. However twenty years of technological improvements have transformed what used to be a simple puzzle and reflex driven genre into an experience with stories and visuals that rival what you see in movie theaters.

In other news, we’re still accepting applications for our junior designer position, and thus we’re getting a lot of votes on our favorite typeface poll. Here’s an updated graphic for this week… it’s a dead heat between Futura, Archer and Didot! Vote for your favorite by applying, or if you’re not looking for a job, you can also just tweet your favorite typeface @ripe, or comment below!

The typeface question, which you’ll find on our job posting (psst… go apply!), has already proven to be way more interesting. When you talk about typefaces it’s hard not to talk about the style, designers and foundries involved. So this week’s little graphic is a bit more data heavy than previous weeks, but it’s interesting! Or at least it’s interesting to us. The top 5 fonts are listed by number of votes received, with their point size and relative darkness representative of their share.

There’s actually been a lot of overlap in terms of how applicants answer the question, and we can already see certain trends taking shape. For example, men tend to lean towards sans serif while women are fairly equally split between sans and serif. Everyone seems to prefer more modern fonts, though there are some older, timeless typefaces that keep popping up. Certain foundries and designers get a lot of action either because they own the rights to thousands and thousands of fonts (Linotype) or because their fonts are currently trendy (H&FJ). Mmmm, data!

Earlier in the week Tomas, Bryan and buddy-of-ripe Katie D’Angelo had front-row seats to listen to Art Spiegelman speak at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. He was there to talk about his graphic novel Maus (originally published in the mid 80’s) which he’s rereleasing under the title MetaMaus. Turns out Spiegelman is a very funny guy, so it we really enjoyed the event. If you haven’t read MetaMaus, we recommend picking up a copy! Anthropomorphized mice and Nazi-cats make for an interesting read.

We also attended a bunch of other events throughout the week, such as an AMA DC board meeting and AIGA DC’s Schmoozeday, but we unfortunately forgot to take pictures, so who cares! Oh well. See you next week!

In other, more sensical news, we are looking forward to attending AIGA’s Schmoozeday next week. A lot of applicants for our still-available junior designer position have requested some face-time with us, but unfortunately we’re so busy that we can’t make time to meet with everyone, although we wish we could. (Hence, why we need a junior designer.) So if you really want to meet us, we’d love to see you on Wednesday the 28th at 6:30 at Scion.

The AIGA DC board and the Corcoran apparently know us too well, because the first thing they did when we arrived was to seat Bryan (a.k.a. “the hungriest riple“) next to a bowl of Jelly Bellys. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Probably not.

We had a great time eating jelly beans, meeting students, checking out what they’d been working on and offering pointers as they look ahead to graduation. Overall we were extremely impressed with both the work and enthusiasm of the students. Of course there was the occasional moment where a student’s eyes would go dead with design-fatigue as we suggested some improvements to a big project they’d been slaving over for months (”I thought I was finished with this!”), but we’re happy to say that pretty much everyone seemed eager to tweak their work to perfection.

Another heartening development is that every year it seems like students are more and more knowledgeable about web design. It’s been a blind spot in design programs for years, mostly due to the relative infancy of the Internet, but it’s great to see it turning around. We’re pretty sure it’s single-handedly due to Ian going around to schools telling students, “If you’re not learning web design you’re making a huge mistake,” which was exactly what he told everyone at AU last week.

After a morning full of reviews, Tomas led a break-out session in the auditorium where he chatted with students about the common pitfalls for job applicants, and how to make you and your work stand out to employers. He promised we’d put a link up to our little “how to create a kick-ass portfolio” worksheet, so here it is! After he finished speaking, Tomas stuck around and took some questions from the crowd and stayed even later to take additional questions one-on-one. Bryan, meanwhile, may or may not have finished the Jelly Bellys (we have no proof one way or the other).

In addition to meeting a bunch of students, we also had the chance to mingle with a bunch of talented DC designers who were also there to participate in the review. Tomas and Bryan both met Gavin from Polygraph, one of the minds behind the oh-so-pretty AIGA 50 poster. In case you haven’t seen it, they have a great video of the poster being printed up on Vimeo. We highly recommend checking it out… doubly so if you’re a print lover.

Thanks for a great event Corcoran / AIGA DC! We look forward to next year’s review.

And even though we’re barely into March we’re already booked up! Earlier in the week Ian stopped by his old alma mater, American University, to chat with some students and to judge the AU Design Expo. He popped in on his old professor Ross Nover’s class (aka Rosscott, who is “kinda famous on the internet“), and spent an hour or so answering students’ questions. They had some great ones about how to get freelance work, how to make one’s portfolio stand out, and how to go about applying for a job. We’ve actually answered these same questions before on our blog and we even put together a little one page PDF on how to create a kick-ass portfolio. It’s worth a download, especially if you’re a student in the process of looking to land that first gig.

After chatting with Ross’s class, Ian spent the next several hours judging the Design Expo along with two other local designers: Soung Wiser of The General Design Company and Carni Klirs of Freerange. There was a wide range of projects and some really great work, so it was hard to choose a favorite!

Below: Carni and Soung judging while Ian stops to take a picture. Bad Ian, get back to work!

This weekend Tomas and Bryan will be at the AIGA DC student portfolio review at the Corcoran. Unfortunately it looks like registration for the event is closed, but if you’re in the area or if you’re already registered make sure to stop by and say hello.