IBM My final project at nurun was, ironically, for the same client as my first project at nurun. Nothing quite like the poetry of bookends to infuse meaning into a situation. My role on the Special Bids project was to provide a skin for a huge Lotus Notes/Domino database. When IBM sales people give a quote to a customer, and think that it may be too high, they can put in a request for a 'Special Bid'. The special bids process is long and complex. So they have a big fat back-end to handle all of the worldwide requests. The main challenge of the design was to stay within the IBM style guide, but still make the sitelet distinctive within IBM. I did this by using Eurostile as my font. No other site (that I could find) with IBM used it. The graph-like element on the right was a nice touch too I think (if not a little obvious). When I first joined nurun in August of 1999, I was put in charge of creating an HTML walkthrough of a number of proposed changes to the 'downloads' section of IBM.com — they wanted a more efficient way to access the tens of thousands of files they have available for download. I grabbed screenshots of the IBM site, made the changes, added a bit of spice, coded the html, burned the cd, and did all of this in under a week working from a 200 page architecture document. Major pressure, major fun. Alas, IBM thought that their downloads section was just fine, they made some changes during 2000, and it's still impossible to get anywhere in that section with less than eight clicks.