I’ve been working with The Boston Globe for the better part of this year on the design of a new site. I first made that announcement in Boston, on the stage of An Event Apart this past May, to a ballroom of very enthusiastic (and, I assumed from said enthusiasm, very local) designers and developers. Today, on the New Media Days stage in Copenhagen, I made another announcement to a room of designers and developers from the news media: that earlier today, the Globe launched onto its new online home.

Now, you might have noticed the new site is responsive, which, given my obvious biases, I’m rather excited about. I played a small part in its design, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about it.

Honestly, I got excited in December of last year, as Filament Group dropped me an email to chat about a project they were about to start working on. Now, I’ve admired Filament’s work since Dan and I met them over beers and pizza a few years ago. But when they approached me with the prospect of working with them to design a new, responsive home for the Globe? Well, it’s like I said: with folks like Todd, Patty, Scott, and Maggie among their ranks, there are some people and projects you simply can’t turn down. (That Mat curmudgeon fellow has been contracting there as well. You try saying “no” to that guy.)

The Globe had also hired a local design firm called Upstatement, and they worked closely with Miranda Mulligan, the Globe’s adroit digital creative director, to establish the new site’s look. Filament’s Patty Toland has already provided a better write-up of the project than I ever could, but I’ll echo her excitement over the collaborative workflow Miranda cultivated between Upstatement, Filament, and myself. I can’t think of any project I’ve worked on that was nearly as fun as the months that followed, as they were a giddy blur of building, sketching, and thoughtful discussion. We tried to work as iteratively as possible, quickly moving from Tito and Mike’s goddamned exquisite mockups into responsive prototypes, in order to experience the design “live” in the various devices and browsers we were supporting. As Aarron Walter might say, we were letting the use of the site inform its design—vetting our early design assumptions with prototypes, which also allowed us to identify areas that needed further visual refinement.

The site you see today is the result of that more collaborative workflow. A process that occurred between two teams who, on a more traditional design project, might have never met, nor established the kind of rapport that ultimately shaped the final product. If you’ve read my book, the final chapter discusses this process in a bit more detail. Heck, if you’ve seen me speak this year, chances are good you’ve already heard first-hand how wonderful I think this more cyclical approach to design and development is.

And on that point: it’s been kind of a weird experience, talking publicly for the better part of this year about a site that hadn’t yet launched. I mean, I was—and still am—incredibly proud of the small contributions I made, of the talented team I collaborated with, but still: talking about a site that hasn’t launched yet? There’s some part of me that’s felt, well, odd about that. What if people’s expectations aren’t met? What if we can’t deliver? What if the Internet gets hit by an exploding unicorn and we somehow don’t finish the project because NO MORE INTERNET YOU GUYS.

(Also, it might be a teensy goddamned bit terrifying/mind-blowing to see the phrase “responsive web design” pop up in a mainstream news publication. I’m just saying.)

A few months ago, Mark Boulton said something on Twitter that really resonated with me, and helped the stress attacks abate: namely, that “design is the stuff around the end result.” Emphasis mine, but Mark reminded me that “design” is the means, not merely the end; the path we walk over the course of a project, the choices we make. And that’s a process that continues throughout the life of a site, even after launch. Because as with any site of this scale, there’s work still to be done. Some optimization is being done as we speak, both on the front- and back-end; some bugs are being tracked, isolated, and squashed; and as the Globe’s content producers become more familiar with the framework and start making bolder decisions, I’m sure the design will be refined to better meet their needs. And above all else, the Globe definitely wants your feedback.

And so, yes: while I’m impossibly proud of the new Globe site of today, I’m most excited about where it’ll be tomorrow. There are too many fine people on the Globe dev team to properly thank them all, but staffed by people like Dan, Jesse, Ian, Caz, Fran, and Adam, I know they’re primed to do great things. People like Michael Manning and Jennifer McNelis helped us chart paths through some challenging questions. And it’s worth mentioning that none of this would have been possible without Jeff Moriarty’s endorsement of a broadly accessible, responsive design; with a champion like that, we could do—and I think the Globe will continue to do—some truly exciting things.

There’ve been a healthy number of reviews already: Andy Boyle is tracking the ones he can find, and Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab wrote up a few more business-minded thoughts and observations. More will follow, I’m sure. Some will (I hope!) see the Globe’s new site as a referendum for the merits of a responsive design; others will find plenty to critique, and justify a more device-specific way of designing for the web.

Me, I think the answer’s inevitably somewhere in the middle. But honestly, the response I’m most looking forward to reading is yours: what you see online at bostonglobe.com is the result of a particular process, tailored to the needs of one project, one audience. There’s much we’ve done that could easily be approached from a different tack, or executed in another, perhaps better, way. And if you do happen to stumble upon that approach, that alternate solution, I really hope you’ll write about it, and share it with the rest of us.

In the meantime, I’ll be exploring the Globe site, hopefully alongside the rest of you. So much of it’s new to me, and I really can’t wait to see where it goes next.

There are people you just need to say “yes” to.

I consider myself fortunate to have known and worked with Erin Kissane for years, and I’ve admired her writing for quite some time before that. Krista Stevens has been a friendly fixture throughout my career; she used to run an impossibly tight ship at Digital Web, where some of my first articles were published, before doing wonderful and incredible things at A List Apart. So yeah, when they asked me to work with them on their New Secret Project©, I basically signed up before they could finish telling me what it was all about.

And with that, I’m thrilled to announce that Contents, a new magazine focusing on content strategy, will be launching this fall.

Here’s Erin’s introduction:

The conversation about content strategy, online publishing, and all the subfields and specializations that surround them is flourishing. Wonderfully, it’s no longer possible to keep track of the posts, comments, talks, and events that take place every week within our world. And it’s not just that we’re voluble: our community is extraordinarily generous with knowledge, help, and professional support.

After benefiting from this conversation in so many ways, we’d like to give something back. A bounded collection of ideas and connections. A place to catch up with the movement of our fledgling industry and the much older fields from which it emerged. An editorial lens.

As a designer-person who benefitted immensely from Erin’s and Kristina’s respective books on the subject, this is all music to the ol’ ears. Because I think Contents is going to be a wonderful, oh-so-valuable resource for those of us looking to better understand content strategy (myself included), and I’m excited to contribute a little bit to making that happen.

In short: because of folks like Erin, Krista, and the oh-so-capable Erik Westra, I know Contents will be something special. You should check us out on Twitter, and maybe contribute an article or eight if you’re so inclined.

Oh. Hello.

So as it happens, I wrote a book. It came out today. It’s called Responsive Web Design. I really hope you like it.

…right, so. In the spirit of transparency I should probably tell you I rewrote that meager introduction about eight times, probably because I’m not sure how to introduce something like this. I mean, by my count I’ve coauthored five books, and writing for each has been a fantastic experience. I’ve written alongside some of my favorite writers—and people—in the industry. But I’m having a hard time articulating just how much it means to have published my first solo title. I’m giddy, nervous, terrified—but mostly? Excited.

“So what’s the book about and stuff I guess,” you ask. Well, Responsive Web Design expands on the ideas I articulated in the original article. It’s a crash course in how you can apply fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to your own work, but let’s face it: design is so much more than those three ingredients. As a result, I’ve tried to share a few stories I’ve picked up from working on real, live responsive projects: the lessons I’ve learned, the questions that have been raised, the hard choices made. The result is a beautifully designed little book (take a bow, Jason) that contains everything you need to start exploring a more flexible, more responsive approach to designing for the web. And at 150 pages, it won’t overstay its welcome.

I have to say, I’m incredibly proud of the end result. And that’s made all the more valuable to me by the fact that it was published by A Book Apart. Jason, Mandy, and Jeffrey have created a special thing in their little publishing powerhouse, and I’m impossibly honored to join a lineup that includes the likes of Jeremy, Dan, and Erin, and will soon include Aarron, Luke, and Jason among their number.

(“Honored” is one way to put it. “Intimidated as all hell” would be another.)

What’s more, this book wouldn’t have been possible without Mandy Brown's careful, thoughtful supervision. She wrote a few kind words about the book, but I owe her a heavy debt: she is an impossibly talented designer, reader, and editor, and I can’t list the countless ways her efforts made the book so, so much better. I meant what I said on Twitter: if you ever have the chance to collaborate with her, leap at it.

So. If this little book sounds like something you’re interested in, I hope you’ll snag a copy. Personally, I’d recommend the paperback + ebook bundle, largely because I think both versions of the book are downright gorgeous: you get a lovely physical artifact, thoughtfully crafted by Stan, as well as an epub that has inline videos embedded in it.

(Seriously. A book. With goddamned video in it. We might very well be dealing with some profoundly flying-cars-and-ray-guns shit right here, people.)

If you’d like, you can read an excerpt from Chapter 3 right now. You can also read Jeremy Keith’s foreword, which might have made me well up a bit when I first read it. (Hush, you.) Dan Cederholm, who proved a thorough and brilliant and hilarious technical editor, also wrote up some wonderful words about the book. David Sleight, Jason Santa Maria, and Jeffrey have some thoughts online, too.

I guess I’ll close things out here, because I’m honestly touched by the reception thus far, that people I admire so thoroughly are excited about this little yellow book I spent ages thinking about. But that aside, I hope you’ll check out the book, find it relevant to your work, and maybe get a little excited. For what it's worth, the web's never felt more variable, more flexible to me than it does right now, and I haven’t felt more excited about designing for the web than I do right now. Things just feel, you know, fun.

Anyway, that's it from me. I hope you like the book, and as always, thanks for reading.

So that Trent Walton went and redesigned his blog. And it is responsive. And on top of all that? It is sexy.

I’ve been admiring the Paravel team’s work for some time, and especially their dabblings in responsive design; if you haven’t seen the Do Lectures site, give it a whirl. It’s visually and technically impressive, and is a joy to browse at any resolution.

But that’s not all: given Trent’s penchant for full-width, type-heavy headings, he and the team at Paravel decided to knock out FitText, a jQuery plugin to create full-width, scaleable headlines from, well, your headlines. I can’t wait to give this a whirl.

Of course, in the middle of this cornucopia of goddamned fantastic things, Trent has to go and drop beats like this:

My love for responsive centers around the idea that my website will meet you wherever you are—from mobile to full-blown desktop and anywhere in between.

Emphasis mine. That sentence—that sentiment—is so good, I want it tattooed on my knuckles.

(Hrm. Wonder if there’s a jQuery plugin for that.)