When it rains it pours right? I’ve been pretty busy this year. More than just busy though, I’ve been extremely lucky to work on some amazing projects with some wonderful teams and smart people.

This is what working as an independent, design agency is all about: good work, good people.

This week, three projects that I lead design on are launching. Here’s a quick run down of what’s out:

MIX Online

http://visitmix.com/

It’s a very rare project, especially one with such high-visibility, where you’re given the creative license to essentially ‘go nuts’ with the art direction—to design it for yourself and create something you care about. To make it yours. But that’s what Nishant Kothary and the Mix Online team encouraged me to do.

It took a lot of iterations, a few false starts, and some soul-searching on my part to find a look I could say that I loved, and which also nailed our much more concrete objectives. But I think we got there.

To me, Mix Online always felt like a community magazine, so I focused on making every element on the site feel considered, thoughtful, and balanced—the way a great magazine feels, and begs to be read.

It needs to be noted, in bold, that none of this would have been possible without the amazing support of Nishant Kothary. He’s a project leader like no other—sensitive, thoughtful, articulate, and understanding. He really pushed me to expand my design skills, without ever feeling pushy. Also, this was an awesome project because I got to work with Tiffani, my business partner and wife, on the copywriting and messaging. Her work is what really takes the design to the next level, and makes the site feel warm and inviting.

Lastly, a big thanks to Evan Sharp, a good friend who translated my designs into awesome xhtml, css, and js. Code never tasted so good.

But enough backstory. The end result is what matters. Here’s a look and a link below; there will be a more fleshed out, design analysis post coming soon. Congrats to the MIX Online team for launching this so quickly.

MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge

http://mix10k.visitmix.com/

Another awesome project for Microsoft. The 10k Smart Coding Challenge is part of Mix Online; our goal was to re-align the Challenge as a separate and distinctive (yet still related) brand and site.

Working with an awesome logo and identity by Wexley School for Girls, I extended this work through the site, and blended it with the “mixing” circles of the MIX Online site. It harmonizes with Mix Online, but still stands as its own bold brand.

I used clear, large, modern type (Helvetica Bold) and gave the page room to breath with lots of whitespace. I handled the template development on this project (using 960.gs), and really wanted to make the design feel interactive and “highly clickable”—so there are subtle :hover states on just about every page element.

A big thanks to Ian Muir (@WoogyChuck) for developing the site from my templates/design and Amy Conklin (@Amyrc) for managing the project.

Professional Bowlers Association (pba.com)

http://pba.com

The PBA.com re-design gave me the perfect opportunity to design within constraints. PBA had worked with an outside firm to develop a great new branding package and very high quality athlete photography; they needed me to seamlessly integrated this branding work into their current website, which was also due for a HTML code clean up.

Given the project’s scope and timeline, we opted not to address IA and site organization issues. At its core, the project was a targeted re-design and usability tune-up for the entire domain.

I designed the look from the new branding elements, and worked in the great photography wherever possible. A strict grid (960.gs, again) helped organize the new look, and gave PBA’s in-house development team a pattern to apply to the many different page types in the site. Lastly, I developed bulletproof HTML code that works great in IE 6-8 (not easy!), a large part of their audience.

Big high fives to Johanna Miller, Tim Morelli, Aaron Sprague, Barry Miller, Adrienne Frank, Louis O’Callaghan, and the entire PBA.com team for being open and easy to work with. When you get Miller Lite-themed bowling ball from a client, you know you’re in good hands.