Casual and comfortable. You get to engage with a variety of designers and speak freely. You get the feel of what every other day would be like. It was a low pressure interview to get to understand personality and fit, as well as technical background and interests. A lot of focus was put on public service design and progress of the city.

Sent resume. Played phone tag for 3 or 4 days, the principal i was supposed to connect with at Eskew Dumez Ripple apparently was traveling a lot, and took them a while to return messages. The voicemails were always very polite. Had an initial interview with a non-principal that was pleasant, but it was obvious the person was not empowered to make commitments regarding compensation and benefits. Then met with two principals in a second interview. They did kind of a good cop/bad cop thing. One was polite, the other one that left polite voicemails was, in person, very abrupt and seemingly bored with having to be there. They both talked at great length about themselves and the firm. Most questions seemed geared to gathering intelligence about the inner working of competing firms I had worked for, and not so much my experience and skills. Portfolio review was pretty brief.