The anniversary of a momentous event from my childhood just passed unnoticed by me until a friend from high school emailed me a link to a story and slideshow from my hometown newspaper.

At the risk of dating myself, it was thirty years ago this week that the Blizzard of 1978 struck South Bend, Indiana. I’ve heard the storm described as a winter hurricane over land that dumped something like three feet of snow on us (and we already had a good two feet on the ground!) with winds that gusted up to 60 MPH creating mountainous snow drifts. As a nine-year-old kid, it was a great time to be alive: more than a week off from school and enough snow to create a really cool network of snow forts connected by tunnels - which caused my mother to worry about cave-ins.

A collection of random memories from the Blizzard of ‘78:

• After it had snowed like crazy for a more than a day and a half, my workaholic dad thinks he’s going to work in the morning. He walks out to the garage, hits the door opener, and as the door goes up, all we see is snow… all the way to the top. Turns out the gale-force winds pushed a drift from the bottom of our driveway up to and over our garage. Awesome. My dad hits the button to put the door back down and walks back in the house without saying a word. That one moment captures the Essence of Dad to me.
• Mom: Ever prepared. While there were panic-stricken folks all over the city who’d been caught off guard by the ferocity of the storm, my mom went out and stockpiled enough supplies to easily see the five of us through until we got plowed out. She knew what she was doing. As usual.
• Watching our neighbors walk back to their house after coming over for dinner. Took them like 25 minutes. To get next door.
• Gladly telling the city plow driver he could use our driveway to turn around. Seriously, that shaved off a good four hours’ worth of shoveling right there.
• The Blizzard Twins: One of my good friends from high school and my roommate at Indiana University during our freshman year had twin brothers born during the Blizzard. His mother had to be snowmobiled out of their neighborhood and taken to the hospital in one of those big plow trucks. Hard to believe those little kids are thirty years old now.

Having spent the last 11 years in Texas, I don’t often miss the winters back home. But I’ll never forget that one.

As an experiment, we did not let Eric eat yesterday while we were on our road trip to Austin. He’s the kind of guy who needs to eat just about every hour. At a local quick-e-mart along the I35 corridor, we finally fed him. The world’s largest Rice Krispies Treat.

And something flew in… You never know what you will find on our chalk board.

I have yet to make it through a week without hearing a, “Hey! Check this out!” from Ronan. He’s always experimenting with new web-based applications and tools so normally I (politely and tactfully) pretend I didn’t hear him.

Last week, however, he had included some very nicely annotated screenshots in an email and I asked what kind of screen capture tool he had used. Turns out there’s a hot little beta called Skitch, currently invite-only, from the crew at plasq.

This app allows you to quickly and easily grab screenshots, camera shots, or import existing images/PDFs and annotate them quickly and easily with a small but well-chosen toolset - I love the arrows. Resizing and cropping is a breeze, although I’d love to see them allow user-entered dimensions rather than having to click and drag. The final image can be saved to your Skitch user account (think Flickr minus most of the features), dragged into any application, or saved out in a variety of formats including PDF, TIF, and SVG.

This last week I’ve used Skitch in quite a few ways:

• During a competitive analysis presentation, I was able to quickly grab screenshots, annotate them with arrows, and drag the shots directly into Keynote without having to save each one out individually (behind the scenes Skitch actually does save them temporarily as *.pict files, so there’s no quality issue when moving from Keynote to Powerpoint or vice versa).
• When responding with comments to an image, Skitch opened the PDF file and let me comment directly on it. The end result was a clear and easy-understandable response that took a fraction of the time it would have taken me via email.
• Omnigraffle Pro and Skitch make a great combination - wireframes saved out in SVG or PICT vector format can be opened directly in Skitch, which I find to be much faster for resizing, writing callouts, and general notes on the original images.

What I can’t describe in this post is how unbelievably slick Skitch is in every interaction. From the tool tips to resizing and anti-aliasing, each task feels responsive and tight. This is one application that has already made its way into my box o’ tricks and will stay there well after the beta period.

The Strategy Team at RD2 owns the Strategy phase of our process. We work hard to research and discuss all aspects of a client’s business to be sure that the projects and initiatives we execute on make the most sense - with what clients want to achieve, and the environment they’re working in. We are young, but we are sharp and quick… and constantly learning.

Our New Year’s resolutions are as follows:

Overall business resolutions

• Get better at our jobs
• Work smarter, not harder
• Learn more
• Get better at presenting
• Do better work, faster
• Go to a major conference. Suggestions?

Eric

• Stick to the exercise routine I started and did not maintain last year
• Rework how I will achieve running a marathon
  • Compete in various 10 - 50k runs to lead up and keep me motivated towards a marathon
• See 4 amazing concerts this year
• Keep organized

Mark

• Ride my bike(s) 100 miles a week
• Get back on my Navy SEALs work out regimen
• Spend less weekend time on the computer and more time reading and being productive
• Learn to cook some new things
• Make it to Munich for Oktoberfest
• Road trips to Palo Duro, the Womble, and South Boundary

Patty

• Cook more breakfast & dinner
• Wake up earlier
• Adopt a dog
• Work out, ugh
• Take more pictures
• Get quicker with putting presentations together
• Be on time
• Improve my writing
• Become more technology savvy

Caitlin

• Read more. Next up on the list:
  • “I am America (and so can you)” - Stephen Colbert
  • “Brainiac” - Ken Jennings
  • “Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style” - Tim Gunn
  • Harry Potter 1 - 7 (The goal is to have them completed by Summer 2009, when my sister graduates from high school and Harry Potter World opens)
• Blog more
• Enjoy doing healthy things
• Get better at managing my time
  • Be late less often
  • Stop underestimating travel time, transition time, and traffic
• Make good financial decisions
• Have more adventures. Especially, but not limited to: concerts, music festivals, and road trips

As you may have previously read on our blog, RD2 and Lucid have worked together in the past on everything from space plans (for our new space station going up in the third quarter) to some pretty exciting websites. For our latest endeavor together, Rene Gracia had been talking to Rees Associates about a complete website overhaul. Knowing it was going to be an interesting task, Rene called on RD2 for some ideas. It was late one evening, deep in the Landmark Center that Rene and I began discussing how to enhance Rees’ strategic online vision into a seamless execution of branding and technology. It was a perfect fit, as Rene not only has a background in architecture, but oversees all design aspects related to Lucid’s branding efforts.

The Challenge:

Rees is a leading international architecture firm who wanted to position themselves as a leader in design and technical architecture. Their online presence was lacking both branding and technical support to ensure that potential clients and future employees interacted with the Rees brand at every touch point. An additional challenge was communicating with offices in three locations and the implementation of their own content and projects. Requiring a more sophisticated approach to update content, we felt it was imperative not to stifle our design efforts with a clunky content management system (CMS). We wanted to have the ability to push the envelope and create a website of exceptional design quality, while still allowing full content administration for the entire website.

The Solution:

As we progressed with our requirements, it became apparent that Drupal was the tool of choice. Drupal also has the ability to address future blog expansion and allow all content to be available as an RSS feed. Drupal 5.x nicely handled all of the content management needs while also providing extensive future community building options.

The Result:

The smooth and crisp interface on the Rees website might mislead you, but such an interface is wrapped up in a sophisticated content management system. Drupal is not the choice for every project, but in this case it more than handled the task. It’s always a good sign you have a great implementation when the team adapts to the process of developing content right away.

Rene’s Thoughts:

“RD2 and myself have a long history of working together and they constantly surprise me with innovative online solutions to help bring Lucid’s ideas to life. The Rees project was a great example of how our partnership brings the best of design to the forefront of technology. The subtle transitions and backend platform all help enhance Rees’ online branded experience.” - Rene E. Gracia, Principal - Lucid, Inc.

RD2 is hiring. Positions we are actively seeking:

• FEC/ Web Developer
• Senior Designer
• Project Manager

RD2 is a small company doing big things. We are very interested in adding ambitious industry innovators to our hard working crew.

General qualifications we look for in our employees include those who are talented, fast learners, ambitious, team oriented, able to work under pressure, and have potential for growth.

Send resumes and examples of work (if applicable) to jobs@rd2inc.com.

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FEC/Web Developer

RD2 is interviewing smart, innovative people who excel in web standards-based front-end coding. We need solid developers to help support our creative initiatives for our large, high-visibility accounts.

We are looking for individuals who are:

• Experts with strong HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills
• Passionate for delivering high quality work
• Driven by the importance of standards, usability and accessibility
• Energized by a fluid, fast-paced and collaborative team environment
• Highly motivated

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Senior Designer

RD2 is looking for designers who understand how to design for online user experiences, especially with respect to “new web” technologies in the area of social media or other general community building web design practices. The designer we are looking for would share our passion for the web and online community building. Must enjoy talking at length with sophisticated front end coders who know how to bring what you imagine to life.

The following general requirements are needed in order for us to put you to work:

• Multi-task oriented
• Highly motivated
• Team player
• Able to work well under tight deadlines

Working knowledge of Adobe CS3 a must. Our space is very open and very cool. Our team is very smart and very intense.

Please send resume/creative portfolio. PDFs are fine, online portfolios are fantastic.

-

Project Manager

If you thrive in a challenging and energetic atmosphere, we have the opportunity for you! RD2 is seeking Project Managers to effectively manage resources, schedules and the successful delivery of multiple, simultaneous projects through the full project life cycle. Knowledge of commonly used project management concepts, practices, and procedures a must.

Job Responsibilities include: Working together with multiple disciplines across the organization to build well-structured comprehensive project plans; Monitoring change requests and escalating requirement modifications that result in scope creep; Scheduling and facilitating project status meetings; Providing direction to resources, monitoring development efforts, assembling key project deliverables, reporting project status, and raising awareness on issues requiring escalation; Providing resource requirements per project and effectively motivating and managing those resources over the project duration.

Additional Qualifications:

• Minimum two to three years of experience in full life-cycle management of small to large scale projects.
• Prior management of multiple projects concurrently.
• Proven written and oral presentation skills.
• Self-motivated and decisive.
• Excellent organization skills.
• Insists on quality deliverables.
• Detail oriented with creative problem solving skills.
• Ability to execute under accelerated timeframes.
• Ability to quickly adapt to change in priorities.
• Tolerance for intense production schedule and conflicting demands on time and resources.

There’s one resolution I would like to make that came to me in my sleep last night. Since I was in high school, I’ve had these dreams that I would be in class and then realize I was in my underwear. It’s terribly embarrassing and I just wish these dreams would go away. We had a meeting with a particular client of ours today (who happens to be in the business of flying people from location to location) and suddenly I realized I was in my underwear (this was another dream, not a reality). Trouble was that it was an important enough meeting to where it would have been completely unacceptable for me to leave and get dressed appropriately. Now, this particular client is pretty laid back, but not THAT laid back. This dream continued for what seemed an eternity. As luck would have it, I get nervous about presentations…and during the REAL meeting, I actually caught myself checking to make sure I had my pants on. I doubt anyone noticed it, but it’s distracting when I’m trying to concentrate on the task at hand. It would be great if I could make these tormenting dreams go away in 2008.

117,238 visits to the RD2 blog
83 posts to the internal blog
20 sites launched
157 trips to Corner Bakery
41,403 hours logged
314 coffee filters used
1 broken chair
224 bike commutes to work
11 7:30 AM strategy team meetings
5 spots in the office Eric has sat in
18 Nerf darts lost/melted/rolled over by a chair
4,634 Subversion commits
87 visible wires in the office on an average workday
108,000 calories consumed on Tiff’s Treats (60 dozen x 150 calories per cookie)

What have we learned? RD2ers work a lot, participate in communities often, and can’t survive without coffee or cookies.

Here’s to even more in 2008!

RD2 saw a lot of change in 2007. Some things went really well, while other things were what we like to call “learning experiences.” One of the most valuable lessons we learned time and time again in 2007 is that we can’t be all things to all people (including clients). Like any company, RD2 has strengths and weaknesses. In 2007 we learned the importance of listening - to our instincts, to our clients, to our peers, and to each other. We’re stronger, older, smarter, and more experienced.

We’ve always believed we are different, since day one in that drafty office in my garage. We challenge conventional wisdom to make the web a better place. We are constantly digging in, gathering information, and learning so that we can be a trusted adviser to our clients.

We will begin 2008 knowing exactly who we are - and who we aren’t. We are comfortable in our skin when we are focused on creating and growing communities for our clients. Our resolutions are centered around this theme:

• Further prove the value of community with measurement and quantification
• Maintain our innovative edge
• Incorporate a strategic framework into every aspect of every project
• Continue to integrate the RD2 team into a knowledge sharing community

2008 is exciting because we have some exciting new clients who have entrusted us to drive their online community efforts. We have a lot of work to do, but we’re ready for the challenge.

This is the start of a self revealing year. We hope our community will continue to engage us, and challenge us when we are wrong. Of course, we hope they congratulate us on our successes as well.