Here at R-Design, we enjoy a good challenge. Sure, sometimes we’ll all sit around the conference room looking at each other thinking, “we gotta do what?”, but it’s the challenge or more correctly the process of successfully overcoming a challenge that drives us all. We may be initially shocked by some of the challenges we’re presented with, but we always chip away at them one idea at a time until we’ve found the solution.

So, when we dumped the 2000 piece puzzle out on the new table, we all kinda of thought “We’re gonna do what?” There was something that possessed us to buy the 2000 piece puzzle instead of the 150 piece puzzle, though (okay, that was all me). What was it? It was the challenge. After all, we’d have finished that 150 piece puzzle during a single brainstorming session. We needed the challenge.

So, here we are on day 20 in puzzle time. Pieces are coming together. Initially, you think the outline of the puzzle is the easiest part. You just look for the pieces with the smooth edge. While that’s true to some extent, you’re working in a very linear fashion. You find the corners, and then each sequential piece in the line after that until you hit the next corner. Now, we’re attacking this puzzle from all sides. We’re putting little blobs together here and there, then ultimately connecting those blobs together to form something bigger.

In the beginning, I thought my metaphor relating the puzzle to ideas was a little cheesy, but I like it a little bit more each day. Each person has kind of adopted a different portion of the puzzle. Adam might by putting together a black rectangle on one side, and Nicole might be putting together a statue. I like finding the elusive pieces that connect what Adam’s doing with what Nicole’s doing. At the end of the day, I guess that’s basically what I do here anyway…

We’ve been working on the puzzle for 12 days now. We’ve finally gotten the the entire outline done. The staff has taken to the puzzle a little more readily now and “puzzle breaks” are not so rare anymore.

We did run into a slight problem with the outline. It’s entirely blue and some of the pieces are nearly indentical in shape. We built both sides going toward the center. When we got to the center and had two peices left, they didn’t fit. It took some trial and error to get all the pieces in the right places after that.

Today, a lot of work was completed on some larger features, thanks to Nicole’s creative block on our self-promotional brochure. There are now some features that will be obvious in the photo. I’m sure there will be some good guesses as to what the puzzle depicts, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be wrong at this stage.