I’ve received numerous emails and several irate phone calls over the last week concerning our lack of coverage of “the puzzle” over the last six months.  The final straw occured last night just before I left the office when I received a call from ABC action news claiming that I was not fulfilling my obligation to loyal blog readers who have a lot of money riding on when we will finish the puzzle, and what the puzzle represents.

Okay, in reality I’ve had a bit of writer’s block on a few recent projects and I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with the puzzle lately.  So, rest assured the puzzle still occupies R-Design’s “thotful spot”.  Sadly, the progress we’ve made on the puzzle over the last several months has been rather pathetic.  Carlos managed to separate all the pieces into four piles of basic shapes.  The overall puzzle strategy now consists of making an educated guess as to the shape of a piece in question, then picking a pile and trying every piece in that pile until the right piece is found.

The good news is that this process gets slightly easier with every new piece we find…

I’d like to say that all the projects we’re involved in go perfectly, but sometimes they end up a little like the puzzle.  In the case of one website, we developed everything and it looked great, but the client didn’t like the font.  We mocked it up with a few new fonts, but he didn’t like those either.  Finally, he came to the office, sat down with an intern and together they went through every font we had one by one.  He didn’t like any of them.  Of course, he didn’t want to pay for a new font, so we eventually got him to settle for one we already had.

Anyway, we’ve made a whole lot of progress on the right side of the puzzle and we’re I’m moving steadily toward the top left corner in a diagonal fashion.  For those of you who didn’t skip right to the photo, thanks for reading. 

Usually, when we start a project at R-Design, that project goes through the “blue sky phase”. Basically, that means that anything goes. There are no limitations to what can be done with that project. Someone might suggest that we etch a design into 4×6 platinum bars and no one will say “That’s way to expensive, you idiot.” The blue sky phase is fun. We throw a bunch of ideas around and get them all out there on the table. Only later do we sit down again to look at those ideas and ask ourselves “why not”.

It’s been 49 days since we dumped the 2000 piece puzzle on the new table in our office. We’re quite literally in the blue sky phase. This blue sky phase is very, very different from the blue sky phase we’re used to, though. This one is not at the beginning of the project. It’s no fun at all. When someone thinks they have an idea of where a particular piece fits, they’re usually wrong.

Out of the 2000 pieces, we’ve got about 1500 in their appropriate places in the puzzle. The remaining 500 pieces are all blue and together they will represent the Las Vegas sky at dusk. Other than shape, there is virtually no way to distinguish one from another. We’ve been reduced to a process of trial and error, trying hundreds of pieces before finding one that actually fits.

We’ve begun working 24 hour shifts in hopes of that we can finish the puzzle and start billing out time to clients before the entire business goes under. I made that part up. We’re actually more productive than ever because nobody wants to touch this puzzle anymore.