R&R predicts 2012

We are a little infatuated with the number 12. Perhaps it has something to do with the time of year, there are 12 days of Christmas, we count down to 12am on 31st day of the 12 month and we just rang in the 12th year of the 21st century. So in honor of the hot little number, we’ve decided to share with you our 12 predictions for 2012. Don’t worry they have nothing to do with the Mayan, Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

1. Rhyme & Reason Design’s website will launch anew – iPhones and iPads rejoice.
2. Facebook, King of the Social Media mountain, goes public – a plethora of status updates ensue.
3. Google’s search optimization algorithm forces users to visit the ghost town that is Google+
4. The 2012 United States Presidential Election becomes a breeding ground for viral videos, SNL parodies, rogue tweets and many more pop cultural gaffes
5. Pinterest increases the craftiness of females around the globe
6. Rhyme & Reason Design wins several new clients, enabling us to hire new employees thus kick-starting the cycle of growth
7. Big Nerd Ranch is first to trend #(an)droiding, BigDroidRanch becomes a cult following
8. Moffitt Cancer Center will unveil a robust digital presence bringing them closer to their patients and closer to a cure
9. Alpha Sigma Alpha will celebrate their 47th biennial national convention with a return to their founding state of Virginia – ladybugs will be everywhere
10. Cookbook Create socializes the cookbook, Garris and Company mitigates the fear of tax season and Taste of Florida mixes up a good time, in other words Rhyme & Reason Design’s clients hit it big in 2012
11. Steve Jobs left a legacy; perhaps it’s the iPhone 5
12. Rhyme & Reason Design will celebrate it’s fourth birthday with new clients, current clients, friends, family and maybe even some bubbly.

Work-ation

Ahhh December, the month for eating too much, spending too much and donning clothes you wouldn’t normally be caught dead in. This past week, I was up in Atlanta combining work with play. On my mini “work-ation,” Karen and I had the opportunity to brainstorm our holiday greetings (look for yours in the mail soon), work side-by-side with our friends over at Highgroove studios and don some pretty epic Christmas garb for Big Nerd Ranch’s Tacky Sweater party.

Highgroove studios is a software development company that focuses on building a lean, agile and elegant back-end application. We met them a while back at Ignition Alley (the co-working space we can often be found toiling away at in Atlanta) and have since had the opportunity to work with them on the inlaw|.me project. Although we can’t talk about the project (it’s not yet in Beta), we can certainly talk about HighGroove’s sweet digs. Their office space comes complete with a espresso machine that would make Starbucks envious, a vast array of organic goodies to snack on and work stations decked out with a multitude of Apple gadgets – it was love at first sight. Outside of their material possessions, they have an impressive manifesto that they strive to follow and which makes them a pleasure to work with. In essence, I am sure you will hear us talk about them many times over in the years to come.

Spreading the holiday cheer at Big Nerd Ranch

Big Nerd Ranch is our super cool client that is dedicated to broadening the intellectual canvas of the world through teaching, consulting and application development. Now, these may be some of the smartest people I have ever met, but they also are the least likely to take themselves too seriously and the most likely to jump on a good time. Therefore, in true Nerd spirit they gathered the office (and a few lucky business associates) together for a Tacky Sweater party. Let me tell you, or you can see for yourself here, there was no holding back on the tacky, the festive and the gender-bending sweater display.

Alright, so it may sound like I did more playing than working on my visit, but I promise you’ll see the fruits of our labors in the next few weeks. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Karen had me put in some sweat equity at the Atlanta Beltline’s 10k, she came in second in her age group, as for me, we won’t talk about that 🙂

Karen making 6.2 miles look easy

Cool by Association

I may be biased when I say that we have some of the coolest clients in the business, but seriously, we work with some pretty impressive companies. However, even I must admit that one of our clients takes the cake when it comes to being cool. Big Nerd Ranch, the unique software engineering and training company that utilizes monastic principles in their technological developments, happens to count Apple (yes the company founded by Jobs himself and the developers of the iPhone) as one of their clients. So technically, if we were to use the six degrees of Kevin Bacon theory, we could say that we do work with Apple, but who would do that?

Kevin Bacon associations aside, our work has made a few appearances at Apple Headquarters. In fact, this past Monday, Big Nerd Ranch’s Director of Corporate Training gave a big presentation to the Apple Enterprise team. The presentation, although kind of a big deal, was not a definite go until a mere seven days prior, which meant we not only had to come up with an idea that could be produced in time, but it also had to be smart enough to impress the epi-center of Nerds. No big deal.

Luckily, we didn’t have time to think about the fact that our work would be seen, and possibly judged, by Apple folks; we had a project to design, print and program. The initial idea was to create an easily accessible, digital brochure. However, the light bulb went on when we heard that the Nerds were planning to pass out their newly released book, Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide at the presentation. What better way to utilize the book as a vehicle to drive the audience to the digital brochure, than with a bookmark complete with a custom QR code. It proved to be an excellent way to create a tangible leave-behind that provided a gateway to a specialized online presence.

With the bookmark idea a go, we laid out a design that would seamlessly match the Big Nerd Ranch aesthetic. Incorporating the QR code was easy, once we gave up on the idea of fitting a square QR codes into a rounded cowboy hat logo.

Once the bookmark was signed, sealed and delivered to the printer, our next order of business was to create the complementary landing page that was to link to the QR code; a pretty vital component. The one-page site didn’t need to sing and dance, but it did need to perform. In essence, the site had to act as the introductory hand-shake of the Big Nerd Ranch, and what better way to do that then mirror the look and feel of the current Big Nerd Ranch website and then sprinkle in bite-sized information about the products and services they offer.

By Sunday afternoon, the day before the big event, the bookmarks were traveling across the country, the programmers were inputting the last lines of code and we finally had a chance to sit back and ponder how cool we now are by association. Just kidding, we actually were thinking, ‘Oh man, I hope they don’t think we could have left more white space!”

To be honest, just having the opportunity to work with Big Nerd Ranch and our other amazing clients, means that we are pretty cool, associations or not.

The importance of in-person communication

Like many companies, we have fully embraced the digital workspace, oftentimes hosting Skype-based conference calls and following client activity via their tweets, blogs and posts. Not to mention, the majority of our services involve creating dynamic communication online. However, after spending three weeks in Atlanta shaking hands, passing out hugs and catching up with clients on a face-to-face level, there is something to be said about connecting offline.

As the Orlando-based partner, I often become a Bosley-esque figure, whose un-embodied voice is the only recognizable feature.  Therefore, it was a pretty big deal when Karen and I had the opportunity to set up in-person meetings and lunches with clients who had yet to put a face to a name (or a voice). Our new bookkeeper, Kim, was the first handshake of the week and let me tell you, if it hadn’t been our first meet-and-greet, I would have bypassed the shake and gone straight for a hug. You would too if you saw her Quickbook skills. After a three-hour financial tour de force, I learned a lot about our new billing process and definitely feel lucky to have Kim on our team.

Not nearly as brain-intensive as Kim’s finance 101, but just as smart are our favorite Nerds, who we met for lunch (and a meeting of course). Now to be honest, I have been lucky enough to meet this team in person on several occasions, but I’ll never pass up a chance to spend some time in their presence. In fact, despite our previous meetings, this was the first time I got to step foot into their new digs. The space is pretty fabulous and I think the next time I’m in town, I might insist that we take up residence in their loft area for a day.

Next on the agenda was a quick popover to the Alpha Delta Pi Headquarters to meet with the wonderful women of the Alpha Delta Pi Foundation. The sprawling Georgia mansion is quite a sight to behold. From the statuesque white columns to the window-encased walkway, I felt as if I was walking through history. However, the impressiveness of the architecture was dimmed by the fabulous personalities of the Foundation women of whom I became acquainted. Yes, I have sent them a multitude of emails and chatted with them on the phone quite a bit, but again I couldn’t tell you anything more than they use proper punctuation and have friendly voices. In person, they are a blast!  Beyond discussing the potential project at hand, we swapped stories about our favorite football teams, movies and books (I even went so far as to admit my love of Harry Potter World and Butterbeer).

Lastly, Karen and I headed out to meet our contacts at Stateside Capital. We’ve been dialoguing with the two women for the past three years, yet neither Karen nor I had actually ever met. The lunch, as much as I’d like to say was a business meeting, was really a chance for the four of us to meet in person. Over sandwiches, we learned more about the company and its industry, but we also developed a familiarity and a connection that emails or phone calls alone could ever forge.

Although my trip has wrapped up, I have no doubt that I will be planning many more excursions to continue fostering the personal connections with our amazing clients. Because no amount of tweets, likes or comments can ever accomplish what a face-to-face meeting can.

Cartoon Sketches, Nerds and a Checklist

You’ve probably heard us talk about the Big Nerd Ranch once or twice, but we can’t help it, they’re our favorite nerds! Plus, they give us an opportunity to stretch our creative muscles in all sorts of different directions. Our latest project involved a pen and paper and some tongue-in-cheek copy.

So here’s the background, Big Nerd Ranch actually holds classes at a ranch, go figure, right? And at this ranch, they host weeklong programming camps, where nerds of all levels can come together and learn about Ruby on Rails, Python Mastery, Cocoa and several other languages that go way above my knowledge level. When the students aren’t in class, they have the opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors, mingle with fellow students, indulge in some pretty delicious meals and even roast a marshmallow or two.

The ranch is an awesome idea and has been hugely successful for the Big Nerd Ranch team. However, the Nerds have found that communicating all the details to the incoming students included too many un-read emails and repetitive phone calls. Therefore, in order to keep the Big Nerd Ranch staffers from losing their voices and ensure that the campers actually receive and read the camp information, we created a camp checklist. We brought in one of our favorite illustrators and long-time friend, Greg Kletsel to work his magic and bring the fun, funky checklist to life.

Check out how some colorful copy, a fabulous illustrator and our favorite nerds turned a regular checklist, into something worth reading.

The Making of a Brochure

You have been a loyal reader of this here blog for nearly three years now and I must thank you many times over for your interest in reading my ramblings. Now here’s my question to you, after all this time of reading about the cool designs we’ve created and the fun clients we’ve worked with have you ever wondered how we come up with the finished products? I know I do sometimes. Well guess what? I’m going to let you in on a little secret, that’s right, I’m going to tell you how we created our newest Big Nerd Ranch masterpiece – the Onsite brochure.

Our partners at Big Nerd Ranch offer some pretty cool services from developing iPhone and iPad applications to hosting weeklong technology classes. Recently, they came to us with the idea of creating a brochure that focuses on their onsite courses. Onsite courses enable small and large corporations to provide up-to-date training to their technology staff without having to send their entire team out of town for training.  The pros, the company gets to save money, educate their team members and pretty much have all their problems solved, well at least the Nerd-friendly technology ones. The cons, there are none. Sounds pretty great, right? Now just how do you tell the decision makers about this idea in a manner that isn’t overwhelming? Well make a fun, self-mailing brochure of course!

So that was the idea, now how did we make it a reality? Well for starters, I gathered up an array of notes, bullet points and anecdotes from the Big Nerd team and compiled the first draft of copy. Not as easy of a task as you would think. In fact, developing intelligent, fun, professional, yet not too professional technology-based copy may be my greatest feat to date. Following a couple rounds of revisions, a crash course in programming languages (in case you were wondering, Cocoa is not just a chocolatey beverage for cold days) and several dictionary visits the copy was ready for a design. That’s right, in design, the copy comes first, just like the horse before the cart.

With copy in hand, it was up to Karen to develop a piece that stayed true to Big Nerd’s brand, but extend it a bit further. Knowing that the BNR team loves their illustrations and drawings, Karen decided to give those whimsical touches some legs and some airplane wings. Wait, did I just say wings? Yes no stuttering here, Karen, our amazing creative director not only is a whiz with InDesign but, unlike my sad excuse for stick figures, she has a knack for hand drawn illustrations. Ok so I could continue to talk about the illustrations, but I am going to let them speak for themselves. Below is the process (in drawings) that Karen went through to design the look of the Onsite brochure.

See aren’t you glad you read through all of that to get to the cool pictures  Stay tuned for more designs to come, who knows the next one could be your project.

A weekend with “Rhyme”

This past week/weekend, I decided to do what few others from the state of Florida or the rest of the 49 states were doing, I chose to drive into the icy tundra of metro Atlanta. Boy what a drive it was. Luckily for me I-75 North was well plowed, as for the heart of the South, that was a whole other matter. Yet as a Florida native with absolutely no experience with driving on ice or snow, I managed to not kill myself. Phew, good thing, because I had a lot of conference calls on Friday.

Now my few days in Atlanta were for work as opposed to pleasure, well let’s be honest, I’d be lying if I said my job wasn’t a heck of a lot of fun. But, should anyone at customs ask, it was a business trip. Karen and I managed to get an inordinate amount done in a very short amount of time. From presenting website designs to Georgetown, TX to sitting down for a rousing good lunch with the Big Nerd Ranch team we were non-stop for three days.

The Big Nerd Ranch crew introduced us to an amazing restaurant, Sun in my Belly, and I’ll tell you what, the food was so incredible that I wouldn’t be surprised if little rays of sunshine were emanating from everyone when they left. The Big Nerd Ranch team was pretty fabulous as well. But, they always are. As our favorite software, training and consulting company, we have a chance to broaden our minds and our project designs. Which means we can’t wait to share the illustrations Karen created for their marketing kit and start brainstorming the possibilities for branding the physical ranch.

Big Nerd Ranch wasn’t the only client that we had a chance to chat with this weekend. We ventured into the retail or should I say wholesale therapy at AmericasMart’s Atlanta Gift Show. Barbie Kennedy of Barbie Kennedy Inspired Home Collections was launching her product on the market at the gift show. Flaunting our R&R t-shirts, we walked through nearly four buildings and 14 stories of product vendors to find Barbie’s booth. And what a booth it was. A full tent with paper lights and white linens met us, along with a vibrant coloring of plates, platters and dishware. From their smiling faces, Barbie and her business partner Julianne, were enjoying an impressive entry into the world of buying and selling. The duo return later this week and I have a pretty good feeling that the orders and contacts will be abundant.

All in all although I had to learn to shuffle across iced parking lots, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my weekend hanging out with some of our amazing clients and working side by side with the “Rhyme” of our “Reason”.

 

Fanning Nerdvana

Last week we encouraged you to achieve Nerdvana, this week we would like you to fan Nerdvana. That’s right Big Nerd Ranch (BNR) is now stirring up conversation on Facebook.

Rhyme & Reason Design developed two specialty Facebook tabs to mirror the Big Nerd Ranch website. The tabs are able to continue the brand strategy, differentiate BNR from the crowd, integrate other social media tools, such as Twitter and youtube and link to the Big Nerd Ranch website itself. By utilizing several forms of social media and linking them to each other, Big Nerd Ranch is able to grow their influence and increase their SEO – both great moves for a company looking to build strong brand recognition and a loyal customer base.

Do you think your business could use more brand recognition, greater SEO and supportive fans? If so, give Rhyme & Reason Design a call or an email to discuss creating a Custom Facebook Fan Page for your business.

Achieving Nerdvana

Ever found yourself wondering what it would be like to achieve a pure state of higher knowledge? Well, that’s exactly what Big Nerd Ranch is offering their students and clients– the opportunity to Achieve Nerdvana. Big Nerd Ranch is the unique brainchild of Aaron Hillegass, established to broaden the minds of students and businesses alike in the fields of training, consulting and software development.

Rhyme & Reason Design was approached during the latter part of 2009 to help create a visually engaging and dynamic online presence for this niche company on the brink of stardom. The creative process allowed for our team to uncover a deeper understanding of the brand, noting the prevalence and meaning of the ten-gallon hat (a key element of Aaron’s wardrobe and personality), as well as create a look and feel that evokes a mixture of higher learning and meditation, all wrapped up with a touch of humor. Come on, their name’s Big Nerd Ranch!

After defining the core characteristics, Karen, our incredible graphic designer and flash developer, took to the computer to combine some traditional Buddhist principles with the quirkiness of the Big Nerd brand. Mirroring the 8 Noble Truths, Big Nerd Ranch came up with a few of their own: Right teachers. Right materials. Right atmosphere. Right approach. Right concepts. Right focus. Write code. Write applications. End result: Nerdvana.

To complement both concept and design, Rhyme & Reason integrated Flash animation with the illustrations to bring Nerdvana to life and create a fully interactive experience. Creating a succinct brand takes a great deal of knowledge about the marketplace, the competition, the target market and the company itself. Through immersion and research, Rhyme & Reason was able to create a strong online presence for Big Nerd Ranch. Achieving Nerdvana was such a hit online that we will be working on establishing the same in printed collateral and brand extensions. Keep an eye out in the months to come.

Haven’t seen the site yet? Visit www.bignerdranch.com