We LUV Southwest’s holiday spirit! Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

So, it only makes sense that we filled their Nuts about Southwest Blog with some Holiday cheer. This year we went with a “culinary treats” theme during the day, featuring a gingerbread house with gingerbread men all covered in snow. Colored lights adorn the blog at night turning it into a Holiday light show. We hope you enjoy this Holiday cheer as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Happy Holidays!

For us, Thanksgiving is so important not because of the turkey or potatoes or pies – it’s the chance to enjoy the Moment – a chance to forget the worries and woes for just a second or two, and breathe in all the goodness that we can so easily forget is all around us. It is in those Moments, that we can truly find rejuvenation and joy for our hearts and our souls.

So while we count our blessing and fill our glasses with optimism (and a hearty side of candied yams), take a moment to appreciate all that you have, just as it is, and maybe remember some great words about appreciating the Now…

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happy Thanksgiving!

Position: Web Application Developer

Ideally, you:

• Consider yourself an expert in LAMP development and management
• Are fluent in WordPress – Minor in Drupal (comfortable writing plugins and modules respectively in both)
• Have solid experience in C#

Bonus points if you:

• Have experience in writing iOS applications
• Have experience in writing Android applications
• Don’t mind occasionally dipping into Sharepoint, Java programming language, or ASP.NET if needed
• Linux system administration
• Server tuning and monitoring

Position: Interactive Designer

As a Designer at RD2 you have a rock solid portfolio with 2-5 years in the industry focusing on interactive design. You live to break out of what is expected and experiment with new styles of design that pushes the envelope in the interactive space.

You must possess great communication skills. As a Designer at RD2, there will be times you present your work to the client. Presentation and articulation skills will be key. You are comfortable and open to feedback from your team and clients. You will receive helpful feedback from the Senior Designers on your team as well as the Creative Director. We are all here to help make the end product as good as we know you can make it.

You are self-motivated and can handle working on multiple projects. You work well in a team environment where the senior staff will help you on the creative process but it is ultimately your concept and vision that will shine through.

Key Responsibilities:

• Understanding of client needs and project goals & objectives
• Ability to see a project through from beginning to end
• Working within the allotted budget and time provided
• Ability to communicate your design ideas clearly and convincingly to clients and team members
• Effective communication with developers to ensure a smooth transfer of files for development
• Staying on top of the latest interactive trends and technologies
• Support the efforts of the senior design team
• Take direction from Senior Designers and Creative Director
• Other design and print design duties as needed

Position: Project Manager

Project Managers at RD2 will work through an organized PMO (project management office) to coordinate resources to deliver the scope of work on a project by project basis. Our team works with innovative social, mobile, and web technologies to help our Clients communicate their brands more effectively. This translates into, at times, complex project scheduling and planning.

The day-to-day activities of a Project Manager at RD2 include:

• Project planning
• Resource allocation
• Budget tracking
• Project tracking
• Client liaison
• Management of scope
• Organizes and facilitates Team meetings
• Organizes and facilitates Client presentations

A Project Manager at RD2 must be a highly organized individual. Your sock drawer is probably labeled and perfectly color coded. Your favorite store might be The Container Store. You are generally a grumpy person if things are out of order. It bothers you deeply if information is not perfectly organized. If these traits connect with you and you have four or more years of experience as a Project Manager, then please contact RD2.

The military runs deep in my family from my father being a highly decorated veteran who served with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Dominican Republic and with a Vietnamese infantry unit as part Military Assistance Command Vietnam, to my uncle who retired from the Army as a Major General having served in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, to several cousins who also served in all branches of the military. The military and Veterans is something I have always known and can’t imagine living without. Although I have never served, I try to align my values with them.

All Veterans, especially those who have served during wartime have seen and experienced things we may never fully understand. They willingly put their lives on the line without any expectations of a thank you. Simply because they have honor and have decided to place their countries needs above their own. If you happen to see a Veteran today, or any day or know of one, please extend a sincere thank you them. They are our first line of defense and the real backbone of this country.

Now, therefore, I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, do hereby call upon all our citizens to observe Thursday, November 11, 1954, as Veterans Day. On that day, let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting and enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.

- from Official Veterans Day proclamation

From everyone here at RD2. Thank You.

Google’s new operating system, code named Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) promises to do many things in the realm of application development. Developers are rejoicing at the ability to develop one application that will work on both tablets and smart phones. Users can’t wait for the boost in phone performance and sleek new interface features. Electronics manufacturers and Cellular service providers are waiting with baited breath to finally be able to support an operating system that has a defined and scheduled release pattern. But what does it mean for designers? Understanding the nuances could mean the success or failure of your next app.

The Back Story

Up until now, the freedoms that have been inherent in Google’s Android platform for developers have also been extended to app designers, but yielding arguable less than desirable effects. The yen to the Apple yang, Google has seemingly put no restrictions on design of any sort. While there are standards docs to be found online, a quick peruse through their app store quickly reveals that they have rarely, if ever, been enforced. Icons can be whatever. Menus can look however. The continuity and familiarity of Apple iPhone’s interface, strictly enforced by Apple’s design guidelines and excruciating approval process, is clearly not present in the Android OS. It’s every app for itself…until now?

If you haven’t seen it, the new previews of the ICS operating system are quite amazing for many reasons. Minimal interface colors, flat and gradient-free icons, muted, dark backgrounds with bright, robust accent colors…From a design standpoint, what we are beginning to see Google create a consistent, visual identity…one that is again, 180 degrees different than Apple’s visual style. In creating a uniquely distinct user interface, we have to consider how it will affect users and designers alike.

The Pudding

Looking at screenshots taken during the unveiling presentation, you’ll note many nuances that are a clear indication Android is transitioning out of its Ugly Duckling beginnings.

First impressions are rarely forgotten. The new user interface experience for Android’s ICS begins at the phone’s lock screen. Sleek, minimal – designed.
	a. Android’s new typeface, Roboto, is reminiscent of Eurostile, but with modern accommodations for mobile interfaces and legibility. b. High contrast and high design work to maximize information and clarity while minimizing what has to be shown.

While the above screenshots are good for reference, it is often more helpful to study a working example. Google’s flagship application, Google+, has typically provided many clues as to the upcoming look and feel since it was first introduced. Looking at some screenshots as the app exists today (build version 2.1.1.219805), there are several aspects that are worth noting. If you already have the app, why not join our circle?

The Take-Away

For users, the expectation, and hope, would be to create an experience that is cohesive and recognizable. Creating a consistent interface and user environment allows users to create a clear “brand” for Android phones as well as creates a sense of comfort and shared expectations – something that Apple has achieved extremely well. But in order to truly succeed, Google will have to enforce it’s style across the phone interface and, more importantly, the app design.

For designers and developers, choosing to ignore (if there is indeed a choice) these new design components and standards could potentially be disastrous for an app’s chances of success. For apps looking to enter the market, aside from potentially not getting the app approved to go to market, extreme deviations in the user interface design can quickly lead to confusion and frustration for the user. For apps already in the market, they run the risk of being abandoned for the “the next big thing,” which will simply be a BETTER LOOKING mousetrap that jives more cohesively with the OS. In a world ingrained in planned obsolesce, designer and developers alike cannot underestimate the value of design as it pertains to familiarity, continuity, and user interface.

Eight years ago we launched our first website. Now, we’ve finally released our latest website that we internally call “V5.” We never really have hated any of the websites we’ve had as a company, but our last one was like a set of clothes we had worn for too many days in a row. It was too dark and too dreary relative to who we are today. Since V4, we had quite a number of portfolio pieces to celebrate and lots and lots of news that has happened through the years. Redoing your own website, especially when that’s what you do, is never an easy task. In our company we have high expectations because of the different things we have learned to apply for our partners. The best advice we gave to ourselves was to follow the process, like we were the client, as much as possible. So we started with strategy. We identified our target audience and we focused on communicating better to that audience. We don’t get a ton of traffic but we do get our fair share. And, the reality of our situation is that people don’t go to the web, search for “design laboratory” and then we suddenly get a call from that google search. Typically the way our website works is that someone will be referred to us, and by the time we have a call or meeting with that person, they have already been to our website and reviewed our blog. That’s about 90% the case. The rest of the traffic on our website is probably far less relevant. Ultimately our key target audience fits into these categories:

• Business Owners, Executives and/or Managers who read about us online or who have been referred by a client or friend.
• Potential New Hires or people who might one day come to work at RD2.

While the above two categories may only represent a very small percentage of our overall web traffic (could be around 10-20%), we feel that this is enough to focus hard on our own content strategy to give them something worth while. The rest of the traffic falls into what I refer to as the EGO category. Here are those categories:

• Competitors – Sometimes it’s like a fashion show and it’s easy to take our eye off the ball and care more than we should about what competitors and colleagues think.
• Industry analysts – While these folks are important, the industry is a huge moving target. There’s more noise than imaginable sometimes and everyone is (or thinks they are) a pro. We’d rather play to our core audiences, do great work, and then let anything that gets picked up by the analysts bubble up naturally.
• Friends and Family – Yeah it’s great to call Mom and Dad and show them your website, and that’s great for the ego too, but it’s not really something we need to target as a core audience strategy.

So, what’s to be expected from the RD2 V5 website that’s worth while? Here’s a list of some of our core focus areas for the new rd2inc.com:

• Communicate our purpose clearly and in one initial page, give our audience a good idea of what we do, who we do it for, and how we generally do it.
• More clearly demonstrate our process. There’s a method and we want to share it. It’s core to how everything gets done.
• Lab Notes – This is an important one. We have a lot to share. Every day we are solving problems in the lab and we face the age old challenge of getting those valuable nuggets out into the field so that in some way it may help others. We like helping others and we think that, for the most part, a lot of what we learn about how to make today’s communications technologies work should be given freely (obviously to the extent that it is not confidential or in any way proprietary). We’re going to be working harder to do just that and there’s a plan for it.
• WordPress 3.21 – This is for our target audience. This is for those of us at RD2 that have always wanted a website where everything could be managed through one central content management system. Yes it’s hard to believe we have been old school until now. So, we deployed our new website and all assets on our website completely in WordPress.

So there you have it, if you’ve read this far. We’ve got a new website. Personally I love this one. I love the update to our branding and the integration of the red. It’s bolder and more confident. It’s less afraid to speak out. It’s bragging a little more about all the great work, great clients, and great people. It’s a better reflection of who we are.

We were even more impressed when we saw the competition. With Nancy Nasher at the helm as the Founder’s Chair, the NTBCA is an organization that has a strong and notable prescence in the DFW community. Among the nominatees were big North Texas companies like Wells Fargo, Fossil, The Jerry Jones Family, and Texas Instruments. Often with large budgets dedicated solely to investing in local community programs, we weren’t sure how our time and creative endeavors would stack up.

But stack up they did and RD2 walked away, thanks our friends at AFFD, a grateful and humbled winner of a 2011 Obelisk Award for New Initiatives. It was not only a great honor to both our work and the success of the AFFD organization, it was truly amazing that our creative endeavors were recognized to be as important and valuable as some of the biggest financial investments made in recent years.

… and in the case of The Asian Film Festival of Dallas our goal was to bring awareness to the Asian Film industry by connecting existing fans and establishing new fans through a confluence of community, video and online social all wrapped in a rich and engaging internet experience.

Featured, From L to R: Chris Ronan, Alicia Chang, Rey Latham

Attending the event and accepting for the RD2 team was Chris Ronan and Rey Latham. Alicia Chang, Executive Director represented the Asian Film Festival of Dallas. Those not shown, but who made everything possible were Patty Murphree, Leia Scofield, and Robbie Michael.

In the end, although we might have another trophy to add to our shelf, what really makes the event so special was our client and partners who go above and beyond to thank us for our work. To all of them, we say, “Arigatou Gozaimasu!“

It’s finally official. After countless petitions for recounts (Team Hen insisted that the ballot was confusing), we have a winner of the First Annual RD2 Know Fair! State Fair Competition: Team Hog! Believe it or not, the winner was decided by just one vote! While we all had fun, don’t fool yourself into thinking that plans for redemption haven’t already begun brewing (or frying?). Winners will receive the following prizes: The ability to gloat for one year, one trophy to share, and some “congratulatory” brew. Thanks again to all who participated!