The Next Web was a very large news site with a very large audience and a desktop layout that had met the smartphone. They were not getting along.

I worked through more than 600 design iterations over nine months, turning dense streams of news, navigation and advertising into one responsive system. Every screen still had to feel unmistakably like TNW.

Large editorial sites do not contain one difficult page. They contain hundreds of page types wearing a trench coat. The work was finding the rules that made all of them behave.

Six hundred iterations sounds excessive until one system has to carry every headline, breakpoint and business requirement. Then it sounds suspiciously tidy.