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Some more good news from RDVO…we were recently awarded with an Outstanding Achievement Award from the IMA.

We won for work we did for the Gillette Young Guns website. Congrats to both the awesome team at RDVO and our great clients at Gillette and P&G.

The recent launch of Cuil.com and Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset.com has piqued some new interest semantic search engines. To deliver on their promise, these new search tools must provide a new experience for search, integrating a number of new paradigms and experiences.

In preparation for a new project, I put together a quick presentation that compares design approaches for a number of prominent semantic search engines, including Powerset.com, Sindice.com, Cuil.com, Twine.com, and hakia.com. Specific attention was paid to general presentation, input methods, display or results, and categorical results approach.

Worth a look if you’re interested in semantic search.

Not a lot of posts this month. I’ve been swamped with work, life, and travel. Lots of great stuff going on!

In the meantime, RDVO is still hiring like mad! We have immediate openings for seasoned .Net developers looking to get involved in some great new projects.

Here’s the job listing if you’re interested.

Email me directly if you’d like to know more.

We’re again looking for amazing people to join our team at RDVO. We have a number of new interactive and user experience projects for clients like Microsoft, Monster.com, and Gillette. We are mostly seeking people for full-time positions but are also open to working with freelancer.

We’re specifically looking for the following roles but as usual we’re on the lookout for pros in all disciplines:

• Interaction Designers (UX, XD, UXD, iXD, etc.): We’re looking for solid designers with experience defining and implementing best-of-class user experiences for applications, complex websites, and GUI for devices and products.
• Interface Developers: If you build it they will come. We’re looking for developers and coders who can implement interfaces solutions using tools like .Net, Silverlight, Flex, and others.
• Producers: You’re a team leader who’s comfortable not just helping the people on your team do what they do best, but you’ve got the vision and experience to plan exactly how to get the project across the finish line. You don’t just coordinate the team — you own the project.

These and other positions are listed on the careers section of the RDVO website.

You can also email your resume/portfolio directly to RDVO: jobs at rdvo.com.

There’s an interesting presentation from Mule Design on how a designer’s approach and strategy for copy can make or break a digital interface.

For a lot of projects, copy and wording are considered “icing” or an element of the design process that gets fitted in later—often with little or no involvement from designers. While many user interface experts believe that digital interfaces cannot support copious amounts of copy (the concept that users scan rather than read), the trend in UI design is more copy, not less. Wikipedia and Facebook are both great examples of how text can be used as the core of the user experience.

The presentation also discusses new communication and expression trends that are evolving as aspects of Web 2.0 – the concept that “We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text.”

The presentation, Copy as Interface, is embedded below.