Ilse Renko — Work
Visual concept preview of the Portfolio Solo template's Work page: Five projects with case notes and quotes from the people who worked with the maker directly. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
I publish only what the client is happy to show and what I would still defend today. Five projects, roughly in the order they taught me the most.
Both of these were handed over to in-house teams the week they launched. The real measure is whether the work still holds up two years later without me in the room. It does.
Nine lines, four seasons, one timetable nobody could parse. A departure-board system that survives low light and older screens, plus a public site their station staff update from a phone on the platform.
A two-person forms product with a very good engine and a marketing site that undersold it badly. I rewrote the pages, the docs, and the empty states, then left them a component set they have extended six times since.
Lume draws some of the best text faces I know and their old site set all of them in the same 15px grey. We rebuilt the specimens so each family is shown at the sizes it was actually designed for, made the trial flow work with one thumb, and cut the licensing step from nine fields to four. Trial-to-licence conversion went up by half in the first quarter, and I still get sent screenshots when someone spots the specimen pages in the wild.
Kaskad move freight for a living and their console had grown one screen at a time for six years. Nobody had done anything wrong; there was simply never a week for the boring work. I took the boring work, then taught two of their engineers to keep it that way.
Three hundred screens audited down to nineteen components and eleven documented rules.
Fourteen weeks from first audit to full rollout, with a working build every Friday.
Collected from project wrap-ups over the last few years, quoted with permission and edited only for length.
She showed up in week one with a list of things we should stop doing. It was uncomfortable and it was correct.
Ilse is the only person I have hired who cared more about our type than we did.
Two of us, no designer, and a site we were embarrassed by. Six weeks later it was the thing customers complimented.
She read four decades of our field notes before drawing anything. Our scientists noticed immediately.
The handover was one afternoon and a document I still open. I have never said that about an agency.
I have shared clients with Ilse twice. Her work arrives having already survived an argument, and it shows.
If any of this looks like the work you need, send me two paragraphs about it. I answer everything within a day or two, including the noes.