This year’s been one of my busiest for speaking, teaching and designing for clients. You might not be able to tell that though, because when I deconstructed this site a few months ago, my portfolio was one of the things that didn’t find its way back. I’ll rectify that in the new year, but in the meantime I wanted to share some of the projects I’ve been working on, starting with this — a redesign for ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.

Only rarely have I come across a large organisation as willing to experiment with new ideas as ISO. You might think that an organisation of that size — and with such a global reach — would be a hard ship to steer in a new direction. What I, and my friend and development partner David Roessli, found were people who couldn’t have been more committed to making their site work better for their users.

Our process began by creating seven personas and user stories to guide our design decisions. What pleased us most was how everyone at ISO involved in the project — from the developers, managers, right up to Secretary-General, Rob Steele — became user advocates.

We created a new grid framework based around the proportions of the ISO logo, then designed in the browser over four, intensive, week-long sprints, each devoted to a different area of the site. Our templates were based on 320 and Up and integrated into ISO’s CMS weekly, so that we could iterate the designs using real ISO content.

I’ll write more about both the design decisions and technical details when the new ISO site goes live in February 2012, — (cough) CSS3, hardboiled HTML5 and microformats — but here are five pages from the new, content-first, responsive design for ISO.

• ISO
• David Roessli’s Cybermedia

Working with the team at ISO and David Roessli (again) was a pleasure and a privilege. Throughout this project, Geneva started to feel like home (although with way, way, way better chocolate.)

After pushing my redesign live yesterday, I’ve been asked a few times about why I pulled respond.js (and with it, CSS3 Media Query support for older versions on Internet Explorer) from the new site.

I’ve been wanting to create a new look for Stuff & Nonsense for a good, long while, but I felt daunted by how much work I imagined there’d be for a redesign. My work diary is so full that I couldn’t see the time I thought I needed, so the site stagnated and over the last few months I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then a few weeks ago, Elliot spontaneously redesigned his site and inspired me to follow suit.

Old fashioned causes like that still stand
Gotta rid this prejudice that ties you down
(Ghosts by The Jam)

Compare these.

Since Ethan Marcotte first lit the fire at An Event Apart in Seattle last year and later in that article, we’ve gone crazy about Responsive Web Design. But the more I think about what this means, the more CSS3 Media Queries I write, the more I realise something. I just don’t care about Responsive Web Design. I’ll tell you why.

Yesterday, something I said on Twitter seems to have resonated. “It takes a court order to get your personal data from Twitter, but just anyone can get it from Facebook.”

Ahead of an announcement I’ll be making tomorrow (don’t tell anyone, but it’s about Hardboiled Web Design workshops), I decided to make a little fun of myself.

If you didn’t get a chance to catch my Hardboiled Web Design talk at a conference this year, your luck just came in. Those fine chaps at CodeWorx have posted a high quality video of the entire talk. I’ll post a text transcript and slides from the talk later this week.

Back in August I started work on a new design for MobiCart, a new mobile e-commerce platform, designing both the front-of-house site and the back-end admin. It was fun, although it lasted only a few weeks.

We just can’t stay off the road. Two years since our last road trip when we drove an RV from Phoenix to Minneapolis, we’re again heading back West and this time we’re Looking for Yogi.

After spending weeks searching for a contract that was simple for me and my clients to understand, in 2008 I wrote my own and published it on 24ways for anyone to use. Now it’s time for an update.

It seems like months ago (it was) when I handed over my design templates for the redesign of CannyBill. Since then, the canny chaps have been working hard to implement the design and @RellyAB has been working her strange magic on their copy. Yesterday the new CannyBill site went live.

I asked: Web designers are cool, but private detectives are cooler. No argument, but why can’t you be both? The answer? You can.

I’m in the middle of preparing materials for a new book, “Hardboiled Web Design”. To demonstrate CSS3 selectors, transforms and transitions I’m putting together a page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in.

Relly Annett-Baker on first draft copy for CannyBill.

Now that our For A Beautiful Web workshops calendar is closed for the year, it was time to push live a redesign of that site with a focus on my new DVDs. This was a chance for me to play, both with HTML5 and CSS transforms and transitions to spice up the interface.

Web forms often ask visitors for non-essential information, but long and complicated forms can hinder a sales or sign-up process. Wouldn’t it be cool to give users the option to hide these optional fields at their own discretion. (This entry was originally posted in 2004 and has been updated in 2009.)

Before we send over our design files to the chaps at CannyBill, first a run through of the browsers that we have tested in the new design and some musings about what browser testing actually means today, in the face of an ever more diversified browser and device landscape.

With the first phase of the CannyBill redesign process drawing to a close, I would like to say a huge thank-you to the CannyBill team for encouraging a public, open design process and to everyone who has commented and tweeted their helpful suggestions.