David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails, instant messaged me one day in December 2010.
Hey, you want to design graphics for a race car?
Hells yeah. Initially I had a clear vision of how I wanted the design to look. I wanted to create a pixelated affect using the iconic 37signals logo (designed by Ammon Haggerty) across the body of the car. The tricky part was the color scheme. I had really no idea where to start. Here are the various colors I tried:
Actually what’s funny is I sprinted on this for 1 week after David approached me with the project. This was right around New Year’s, so I didn’t have a lot going on. After these initial designs I got swept away with other duties (like designing materials for the 37signals Suite). I dropped the ball on the car design.
I didn’t hear from David for a while. Actually, I was avoiding the subject because I didn’t really come up with any other designs. I knew the race was in March, but I didn’t really have a grasp of the timeline to create the graphics.
Then earlier this month he tweeted:
37signals car coming alive: http://yfrog.com/gzdqdphj -- thanks to @asianmack for design! 1st race in 2 weeks @ Sebring.
I was pleasantly surprised. His car graphics guy took my concept and made it a reality. The car looks great. Good luck in Sebring DHH!
Follow David and the 37signals Racing Team today at 37racing.com.
Stuart Gibson
on 16 Mar 11Is the design going to be carried across to DHH’s Zonda HH?
Ben
on 16 Mar 11Was this behind the scenes intended to show us a communication problem? Sounds like you got the project taken from you and you didn’t even know it until your boss announced it without giving you credit.
JD
on 16 Mar 11Ben, not at all! My design was translated perfectly by the production team. David also gave me credit in the tweet. I was surprised seeing a bunch of @ mentions in my Twitter stream. Very happy to have participated!
Joshua Pinter
on 16 Mar 11I was humourously thinking the same as Ben – with all the communication tools you guys develop I’m surprised this could stay under the radar :)
But the car looks great.
Best of luck David, I’ll be keeping tabs!
JP
asdf jr.
on 16 Mar 11I think it’s safe to say that you guys have officially arrived. Congrats! …and when can I get a ride?
Sean
on 16 Mar 11Ha! You guys continue to be an inspiration. That looks like fun—both the racing and the design. Good luck to DHH.
Seph
on 16 Mar 11That’s an awesome looking business expense. Enjoy the ride!
Regis
on 16 Mar 11I second Ben this time: it’s as if there is a communication problem :-) I don’t know, I usually like SVN posts but this one makes me incomfortable: are you afraid of DHH or his reactions? Why did David remain silent? Did he not give you feedback?
This is weird.
Steven
on 16 Mar 11Black is always a great color for race car so you don’t show tire marks.
Of course that is if you’re aggressive enough to have battle scars!
JD
on 16 Mar 11Guys, there is really no more drama than I’ve written. One thing I’ve left out is his design guy made something that David wasn’t too happy with at first. He approached me to see if I could come up with something better. I treated it more as a side project – not an official 37signals project.
However, if this doesn’t satiate your curiosity, you can use this version:
David’s exploits in his Danish castle were infamous. It was a grand old structure, complete with dungeon. Word amongst the team was that he would often punish employees. I actually heard Joshua Sierles was left there for a couple weeks after he modified the wrong file on the server.
Needless to say, I was frightened. What would happen to me if David was unhappy with my design? My wife and kids in Chicago would be left without a husband and father. There was just too much to lose.
I decided that I couldn’t broach the subject with David any longer. When I saw him in the hallway, I would look down. Avoiding all eye contact. The 37signals car design would languish. I would have to do this, for my family.
Amazingly, he used my design! Yay!
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Mar 11Looks obnoxious to me.
Seriously, you’re own racing team.
Chris Newell
on 16 Mar 11+1 for the alternative truth!
Sean
on 16 Mar 11@JH lol! nice.
Sean
on 16 Mar 11er, @JD. My muscle memory paths are crossing.
Adam
on 16 Mar 11Wait! The engine’s at the wrong end of the car!
Don Schenck
on 16 Mar 11Seriously don’t like the yellow. But, there’s no arguing taste.
Gulf Oil livery FTW!
B-Rye
on 16 Mar 11The yellow looks like a rip off of the color theme from the livestrong foundation.
Michael
on 16 Mar 11Haha @ Jamie’s story
The post is just not written quite right, so the vibe throws people off. It is the writing equivalent of flawed design. Which is totally cool because Jamie is a great designer first, and I enjoy his posts a lot.
Lester
on 16 Mar 11Looks like a great racecar for a circa-2005 Jason Kottke.
Seriously, though, this looks great. I’m glad DHH picked the yellow variant. Also love the hood (visible at the 37racing page).
And thanks for posting the link to the story behind 37signals’ logo. I was always curious about that.
Jussi Pasanen
on 16 Mar 11I reckon the yellow on black looks great, good work!
If anyone’s interested in race car livery design there’s quite a bit over at Speedhunters, for example this piece on Designing the Team NFS livery.
Drive carefully :)
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Mar 11What next? Pictures of the 37signals yachts? How about sponsoring fewer race cars and spending more time making Basecamp more useful?
Most people/companies with too much money on their hands at least have the decency not to strut around with it.
Next post prediction: a photo of the new 37signals office heater, fueled by burning $100 bills.
Lyndon
on 17 Mar 11I second that… first the Zonda HH, then a race car ?
That’s basically a way to tell the world :
Lyndon
on 17 Mar 11That’s basically a way to tell the world : “we’re not even in the same league as you any more, while you’re struggling every month and try to sustain your business without having to lay off too many employees and be able to pay the bills, we are playing around in exotic cars with the money you’re paying us every month”.
Seriously guys, don’t you even realize that your major strength was that you were the same kind of small company as most of your customers, that you were sharing the same needs, that you were facing the same difficulties ? What you’ve become would be perfectly suitable if you were selling luxury goods, or if you were a company like Apple where customers buy its products because of the intrinsic quality of the products, not because of the company.
Problem is, you’re not in that kind of business. People are interested in what you’re doing because they feel that you are like them. And you’re basically telling them “so long suckers”
John Topley
on 17 Mar 11@Lyndon I pay my Backpack subscription because I like the product and because it meets my needs. I’m guessing that 37signals have become so successful precisely because so many other folk feel the same way. Yes, a lot of what is written here resonates with me (not all of it), but that’s not why I give 37signals money every month. If Backpack suddenly became crap then I’d stop paying for it overnight.
If David wants to spend his personal money on a custom Zonda then good luck to him – I couldn’t care less. Guess what? I spend some of my money on things that I like too. As far as I’m concerned he’s earned it and the same goes for Jason and the other signals. The race car is David pursuing his goal of driving at Le Mans, which I think is interesting and admirable. I wish I was as driven as him at turning my ambitions into reality.
You make it sound as if 37signals are holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use their products. Well guess what? You always have the right to exercise your freedom of choice by taking your money elsewhere if the continued success of the company offends you.
JD
on 17 Mar 11Lyndon, I mean no disrespect. However, I don’t understand your logic. You’d rather see 37signals as a struggling company than one that is self-sufficient enough to be around for many years to come? Why would you trust your data with us if you couldn’t trust us to run our business successfully?
Also, we are a small independent business. We are headquartered in Chicago. We employ 26 people. We are profitable. It isn’t like we have 400+ employees and we’re still trying to figure out how to make a profit. We have 26 people. I consider that to be a small business.
We haven’t taken loads of VC cash. We’re not looking for an exit to sell to Yahoo or Google so they can screw Basecamp up with whatever genius management those companies employ. We’re a small independent business that’s in it for the long haul.
We try to be successful so that our customers can be successful. I hope that gives you some confidence that our business isn’t about to fail or go kaput.
This is solely my perspective. I don’t mean to speak for Jason David, or the rest of the team at 37signals. However, I’m sure they would agree with my points here.
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Mar 1137signals is making Basecamp better every day: http://basecamphq.com/changes. Follow along.
Lyndon
on 17 Mar 11@JD I have no doubt that your business is successful. However, even if you are a small company, it seems that your daily preoccupations are so distant from those of your customers, that you’re no longer the company you used to be.
You are the ones who have insisted so much that you were able to make good products for small business because you knew what it was like to run a small business.
The point I was trying to insist on is not that I’d prefer 37 signals to be struggling. The point is that you seem so disconnected from the current situation of the vast majority of small businesses (and not so small too…), that I think you’re no longer in a position to pretend you can understand their needs.
That doesn’t mean that your products are necessary bad either. But be prepared to be judged on the sole quality of your products, and not on the fact that some of your customers would choose your products rather than the ones of some “big players” simply because they would expect you to be much closer to their needs.
And to make it clear, if it was for the sole quality of the products, I wouldn’t have chosen yours when I first subscribed. But I still preferred yours, because you were not only selling products, you were selling a wider vision of the way to make business, that was quite matching mine. Please understand that I think it’s no longer the case.
That doesn’t mean that I will all suddenly close all the accounts of my company (indeed, you know very well that it’s not an easy thing to do, after having all your customers data in it, not to mention the effort spent on having all the people on the projects using those tools…). But I’m no longer in a position to support your products by being tolerant to their defaults (and indeed, I’ve already taken the step to downgrade all my plans to the strict minimum a few months ago, so this move is not strictly related to these car stories, it’s a much deeper feeling that that)
JD
on 17 Mar 11Lyndon, I respectfully disagree. I’m sorry that you feel that way about our products too. If you’re ever in Chicago you are welcome to come by our office for a visit (http://37signals.com/contact). I’d love to chat more about what similarities our businesses share.
asdf jr.
on 17 Mar 11DHH is a car/racing enthusiast… his dream is to want to race in Le Mans. He is part of a company that has done very well. So he bought a race car and slapped his companies logo on it.
37signals has been doing very well for years… and I am not sure the company even struggled that much pre-Basecamp days. I wish my company had “made it” so I could pursue some of my dreams. But alas…
Wagz
on 17 Mar 11I have a great idea for the team!
I would love to see DHH and 37racing use all of the tools that 37signals builds to manage their racing exploits. It’d be a really cool application for basecamp, backpack, etc.
Having worked on a race team, I can tell you there’s a TON of both data and tasks to keep organized – from data generated during maintenance and car set-up to keeping track of tasks during qualifying and race day activities.
Make DHH leverage that bad boy for marketing the company – race fuel is expensive, it’ll be a nice ‘R&D expense’ ;-p
Michael S
on 17 Mar 11Lyndon: seriously? Because they support an employee with a hobby, their vision is no longer matching yours so that’s a big problem? I consistently read posts here about how companies making software should make money from the start. 37S is making money. Where’s the conflict?
Have their products or service gone downhill since sponsoring this car? Has their vision of how to create software been compromised?
Lyndon
on 17 Mar 11@Michael S : the race car is not the problem… The race car is a symptom of the problem.
The problem is that being a “small business” is not about the number of employees. It’s about the values that you build your decisions on. When you come to a point where you accept, even embrace the fact that some of the people in the company make that much money, you’re simply no longer running a “small business”.
Which is perfectly fine, in some cases. If I’m looking for an architect for designing me a 10 million $ house, I’m expecting him to drive an exotic car, because it means that he belongs to the same world as me. But if I’m looking for an architect for designing an hospital in Haiti, I don’t think that one who drives a Ferrari would be suitable.
There are situations where these considerations don’t really matter. I don’t care if Jonathan Ive drives an Aston Martin, because what matters is that the final product he has designed pleases me or not. But for 37signals products, it’s not the same. One of the reasons, is that it’s a long-term commitment, one where you don’t know how the products will evolve, and all you can hope is that they will evolve in such a way that suits your needs. You have two ways for that : either you choose a product that you can be sure it will be suitable for your needs (but it comes with a price, because it usually means either a self-developed or at least self-configured product, or a very long time contract with a “big player” that will be full of “strong” commitments to ensure they guarantee the conformance of the product for XXX years), OR you can choose a company that you think it will have such a vision that the way they shape their business is “naturally” coherent with what you need. And in such a case, it’s all about the trust you put on that company (and believe me, I know what I’m talking about, because that precisely the reason why my own customers choose me : because they trust me for having the same values as them, so that my own strategic choices in the future will probably be compatible with theirs).
The problem here is that 37signals seems to have gradually moved from a “small business” to something… else. At least, clearly not the same kind of “small business” as mine. So I have to be perfectly aware that I can’t simply rely on trust to hope that the future of my working with their products won’t come to a bitter end… I have to be fully aware that they may someday make any decision, that could possibly impact the future of my company so much, that I can’t possibly go on using their products without having at least (guess what…) an “exit plan”, just in case…
Or maybe I was a fool at the first place, believing that it could be otherwise…
Anonymous
on 17 Mar 11@Lyndon: Instead of crying about 37signals’ success on their blog, how about you get on your game?
Success isn’t unachievable for anybody. You should aspire to this kind of success, not try and bring it down.
But then again, haters gonna hate.
Andy
on 17 Mar 11The hipster segment of the 37signals fanbase is frustrated. If this was a vintage Vespa with an adorable sidecar, there wouldn’t be an issue.
Lyndon
on 17 Mar 11@Anonymous : I think we simply don’t put the same meaning on the word “success”.
For me, my business is currently successful, because I agreed to lower my prices by more than 50% to release a bit of pressure off my customers. By doing so, they were able to avoid laying off some of their employees, even if they were in a difficult financial situation.
My business is successful because I could give a significant raise to my own employees, even if it meant cutting on my own revenue. I can barely pay for my apartment now, but at least they can too.
My business is successful because I always have paid every single $ on every bill, for every tax I had to pay, and without any delay.
If I had the money they have, I wouldn’t say my business is successful. Because it would mean that I didn’t pay my employees enough, or that I did charge my customers too much, or that I hadn’t paid what I had to, or maybe all that at the same time. And what does it mean ? It would mean that someone, somewhere, who directly or indirectly contributed in “my success”, had not be treated fairly. That’s precisely what I’m trying to avoid.
Don Schenck
on 17 Mar 11@Lyndon: You’re coming across as quite jealous.
You aren’t; I know. But that’s the perception.
I’m only trying to help you out here, brother.
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Mar 11Lyndon, I agree with your overall point and that of some of the [other] cowards.
My question is: doesn’t a race car fit the image of a company like 37s? They make a good product and they piss off a bunch of people.
In my opinion, the “obnoxious” decisions made by 37s is both the company’s strongest and weakest point.
Strong, because being willing to piss off a significant number of possible customers [who wanted this or that added] also led 37s to success with their products that were simple and did a few things well.
WEAK – because the same bullheaded approach is offensive and obnoxious in other situations. Articles about the founder sometimes make me gag. The aloof self-assuredness of most of the articles on this site rub me very wrong.
Look for an old post on why 37s doesn’t support non-profits with any kind of price break. The day that article was written, our company began developing a Filemaker solution to replace 37s products. It has been an undertaking, and won’t save us any money, but I was tired of buying 37s chalkboard drawings and race cars.
I still have this feed, and still find it interesting at times, but usually it is a reminder of why we don’t send hundreds to these people anymore.
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Mar 11doesn’t a race car fit the image of a company like 37s? They make a good product and they piss off a bunch of people.
Race cars piss people off? How’s that?
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Mar 11Race car = showy, pretentious.
David O.
on 18 Mar 11@Lyndon For a long time, you were not paying attention. 37signals was never in dire straits financially as a company. The difficulty they shared with their customers and audience at one time was not having a good web-based project management software. They solved that problem, and made a lot of money for doing it. Their millions in profits and wealth has been part of their image for a very long time. They attract a lot of small business owners who want to be “bootstrapped, profitable & proud” like them. You are not paying attention.
Also the claim that an architects who drive’s an Ferrari won’t be suitable to design a hospital in Hati is unnecessarily discriminatory and just plain wrong. Great architects are typically wealthy. A person’s car is not a good way to determine their empathy or technical skills.
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Mar 11Race car = showy, pretentious.
What’s pretentious about a race car? Please be specific.
Mahangu Weerasinghe
on 19 Mar 11As a small business that learnt a lot from 37 Signals, we’d be the first to be critical of them if we felt they had gone back on what they’ve been advocating all these years.
But they haven’t. Small is an attitude, an outlook, a worldview and as far as we’re concerned, they’re still right on the money.
Here’s why -
http://vesess.com/blog/small-is-small/
Anonymous Coward
on 19 Mar 1137signals did well and we can (and should) learn from them.
But no, they’re not “one of us” anymore. And the number of employees has nothing to do with it. A consulting firm run by 5 top guys that makes 50 million / year could be called anything, but it’s not a “small company” in the same way we fit to that expression.
Matt
on 21 Mar 11Haters gonna hate
Anonymous Coward
on 21 Mar 11Playahs gonna play!
This discussion is closed.