Jeffrey Zeldman has done more than most have the energy for with regard to encouraging web standards, clean code and intelligent CSS, and today is his birthday.

Almost as if to prove how seriously dedicated we are to enforcing standardized web coding at our firm, Alex brought in homemade cupcakes to help us celebrate the man getting older.

Here’s to you, Jeffrey. See you at SXSW?

Since long before I was born, it’s been a Busch Family Tradition to have chili & hot chocolate on Christmas Eve. Nobody’s sure exactly what year or why this began, but given that my father grew up in Wisconsin, we imagine it probably happened whatever year was the coldest, and when his family didn’t have a lot of extra cash for extravagant dinners. It worked out so well, we suppose, that people in my family have enjoyed it every year since.

Well, most of us have enjoyed it. (more…)

Business ’round here is never slow, but when it was a tiny bit slower, I went to our web site and grabbed the RD2 logo and cropped it so it would fit in the space allowed for Buddy Icons (popular among AIM and iChat users, among others). Leia joined the company and decided to play along and used the logo for her IM icon as well.

Inspiration struck yesterday and she decided to implement a company-wide system of buddy icons, all with the RD2 logo and all including our names. I think she was a little taken aback by my overwhelmed excitement when she was finished, which was about 5 minutes after she started (and that includes the time it took to eat the pizza). But I think it goes a long way in today’s instant communication culture toward providing an iconoclastic atmosphere.

I don’t see why not, for instance, a company might have a Buddy Icon designed along with their letterhead, business card and PowerPoint presentation templates.

At the same time, it reminds me a little of a Jerry Seinfeld joke, which I will paraphrase here:

Every time you see a movie with a civilization from the future, or from a different planet, they’re always dressed the same. I think the decision is just made one day, like, “All right, from now on, everybody’s got to wear the one-piece silver suit with the V-stripe and the boots. We’re going to be visiting other cultures, now, we want to appear like a team…”

Team member Bryan, signing off.

It occurred to me that we haven’t blogged about our breakfast tacos. Really, Alex would be better qualified, because he pays more attention to food than, well, anyone I’ve met, but I’m here at the office early and I’m patiently awaiting our Friday morning treat.

We get them from a place nearby called “Tin Star“. The particularly fun part is (more…)

I come from a guerilla-style, one-man-army type of mindset where web development is concerned, and collaborating on building a web site, what is essentially a creative endeavor, is still growing on me as The Way to Do It. RD2 employs a strategy that recognizes the fact that people are more right-brained, or more left-brained, and very seldom will you find someone who is perfectly balanced. While it’s true that a person can handle both design tasks and information architecture tasks, we realize that a person is likely to be good at one and not so much at the other. (more…)

We were fine-tooth combing our portfolio book, searching for any typos or misspellings, and as luck (or smart business decisions) would have it, we’ve got a couple of grammar nerds in the office. Correcting someone’s grammar in a friendly setting can be seen as confrontational, but where business is concerned, we feel it’s vital.

We came across the word “that” in a restrictive clause, (more…)

I was reading the other day about smart web design techniques, and one of them impressed the importance of using only as many aesthetic elements as you need to convey the message of the site. That is to say that if you feel like adding a little doily in the background, you’d better be sure that it helps express the reason for the page and takes nothing away from the same.

It’s no surprise that the same is true with words; over and over again we are told that “less is more.” Best friends can convey many sentences’ worth of information with a single glance, filled with nuance and poetry, but a lot of business communication can require a paragraph to explain a single point. (more…)

Bryan, here. I’m a Project Manager at RD2, as well as the “weblogmaster” for the company. At 5 1/2 years, I’m not exactly a pioneer of the medium, but I have been around the block a few times, and you may know me from sites like the current events satire site “What Would Brian Boitano Do?”, and LifeAfterMTV.com, a chronicle of the journals kept by former cast members of “The Real World” and “Road Rules.”

Since I fell in love with the Internet in 1993, (more…)