Perpendicular Angel Design

Perpendicular Angel Design is the independent design practice of anne gibson, a web and user experience designer working from 95 Earl Dr in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The studio sits in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, near Valley Forge, and serves clients both locally and remotely. The practice operates under the tagline "Organizing and simplifying, one illumination at a time," a phrase that describes the type of work it takes on: untangling complicated systems, documenting how things actually function, and making digital products usable by more people.

The practice concentrates on accessibility, information architecture, content strategy, design systems, process and navigation design, and data informed user experience work. Rather than offering a broad menu of visual branding or marketing services, Perpendicular Angel Design focuses on the structural side of digital products: how information is organized, how users move through a process, how components are specified for developers, and whether the finished result works for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnification, or other assistive approaches.

Background and Experience

anne gibson has roughly 15 to 20 plus years of professional user experience work, with in house and consulting engagements at organizations including Vanguard, Boomi, Vertex, and Bill. Freelance design and development work goes back considerably further, to the Geocities era of the early web, which means the practice carries experience spanning hand coded personal sites through modern enterprise design systems.

Within the accessibility community, gibson is widely known for the article "An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues," originally published on The Pastry Box in 2014 and shared extensively since. The piece presents 26 fictional people, each with a different visual, auditory, physical, or cognitive and neurological need, as a way to move accessibility discussions away from checklists and toward human circumstances. A second well circulated article, "Reframing Accessibility for the Web," was published by A List Apart. The Alphabet of Accessibility has also been delivered as a talk and as a 90 minute workshop at the IA Summit, World IA Day Philadelphia, World IA Day Pittsburgh, EdUI Conference, Interaction 19, Button, Drexel University, Vox Media, Boomi, Vertex, and the Philadelphia chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

gibson was nominated for "Emerging talent of the year" at the 2015 Net Awards. She is also a co-founder, co-owner, and managing editor of The Interconnected, and publishes science fiction and fantasy writing at kirabug.com.

Current Focus

As of December 2024, anne has moved Perpendicular Angel Design to the forefront of her career and is taking on shorter engagements and what the site candidly describes as "odd jobs," scoped so they fit alongside family caregiving responsibilities. In practice this means startup consulting, light design work, speaking engagements, content audits and migrations at roughly ten hours a week, portfolio refreshes, and platform migrations away from WordPress. Prospective clients looking for a full time embedded designer on a long multi year program will find the scoping approach different from a traditional agency, while those with a defined, contained problem will find a senior practitioner available directly, without layers between the client and the person doing the work.

Services

• Startup Design Consulting: advisory support for founders building a new product, including light hands on design work. Engagements are intentionally kept small in scope.
• Accessibility Talks and Workshops: conference presentations and 90 minute workshops built on the Alphabet of Accessibility framework, suitable for design teams, developer groups, and mixed audiences.
• Accessibility Auditing and Remediation: manual accessibility testing, organizing a remediation approach, tracking defects in JIRA, Confluence, TeamTrack, or ServiceCenter, and page integrity testing to confirm that coded pages match the approved designs. Color palette accessibility remediation is included in this area of practice.
• Content Audits and Content Migration: auditing existing content or moving it from one platform to another, available as an ongoing part time engagement of about ten hours per week.
• Content Strategy for Intranets: documenting strategy, developing governance processes, leading cleanup efforts, writing and editing content, and training staff on the content management system. Past work includes SharePoint site redesigns and career development intranet sites.
• Information Architecture and Navigation Design: site architecture, site maps, search improvements, and process and flow design. Complex, constrained, or heavily regulated problem spaces are preferred, and recommendations are backed with user research and database query data rather than opinion alone.
• Design Systems Documentation and Specifications: redlines, HTML prototypes, component behavior specifications, and content inventories. Experience includes launching a design system and advocating for familiar documentation tools such as WordPress, Confluence, and SharePoint over specialized design system platforms when the audience already lives in those tools.
• User Research and Strategy Artifacts: research plans and execution plus personas, scenarios, workflows, and capability strategy sheets that connect strategic goals to measurable outcomes.
• Portfolio Review and Refresh: practical help for designers who have not updated a portfolio in years, particularly those whose employers are signaling layoffs.
• WordPress Migration: assistance moving a site off of WordPress, described on the practice website as a newer capability still being developed.
• Visioning Session Facilitation: facilitating working sessions and delivering presentations to audiences that range from peer groups to executive level stakeholders.
• Logo and Visual Design: limited visual design work, described openly as a secondary rather than primary skill, with past logo samples published in the portfolio.

Working Approach

The practice leans toward documentation and evidence. Deliverables tend to include the artifacts that development and business teams can act on: specifications, redlines, prototypes, inventories, audits, and tracked defect lists. Accessibility is treated as manual testing work alongside automated checks, with remediation organized into something teams can prioritize and close out over time rather than a single report handed off at the end.

Because much of the past work was done inside large organizations with confidentiality obligations, case studies are available on request and are password protected rather than published openly. Clients evaluating the practice should expect to ask for those directly.

Location and Contact

Perpendicular Angel Design is based at 95 Earl Dr, Pottstown, PA 19465, in Chester County near the Montgomery County line, with convenient access to the Greater Philadelphia region including King of Prussia, Valley Forge, Reading, and center city Philadelphia. Much of the work is conducted remotely, so clients outside the region are accommodated. The practice can be reached by phone at (610) 405-2087 or through the website at perpendicularangel.com, where the portfolio, published writing, and speaking history are available. Given the current scoping approach, early conversations about timeline and engagement size are useful for both sides.