The Best Dimension

It’s here: that moment we’ve all been waiting for when we announce the results of our annual popularity contest, the Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada.

This year we chose to emphasize innovation. We hoped to highlight the individuals and companies that really exemplify Northern Nevada as a community of pioneers, and you, the readers and voters, certainly made our hopes come true. You called out the biggest, smartest, the most cutting edge, the most beautiful, the most popular, the techiest … the best from all over our little section of heaven. And that’s what this popularity contest is about.

This is our 19th year doing this readers’ poll. While it has evolved and changed year after year, some things don’t change at all. There are never enough categories to name everything and everyone that’s great about Northern Nevada. There’s never enough space to thank everyone who had a hand in making this results issue so great to look at. There aren’t enough words to congratulate all the winners who were able to stand out in our community enough to get other people to recognize them (or to wage a campaign for their own recognition). It’s all in good fun.

This year, we sought to symbolize our interest in innovation with our three-dimensional art by Katie Romanko and with changes we made in the balloting. This year, we did two things differently. First, we created an autocomplete list based on last year’s winners and including some of Northern Nevada’s newest businesses that readers could use instead of typing whole names in some 350 categories. We also broke up the individual chain storefronts in order to award the best individual efforts, as opposed to largest chains. Tallying the votes, it was obvious that while some readers found the autocomplete helpful, none felt constrained to the list. These two innovations made for the most accurate balloting ever, and set the stage for even more precision next year.

And so, Northern Nevada RN&R readers, take a deep breath and pat yourselves on the back. You went the distance. You are truly what makes this the best place around.

3-D art by
Katie Romanko