Walk into any Halloween pop-up store right now and you’re likely to find the same assortment of merchandise: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes and “Frozen” princess dresses, plus old stand-bys like witch hats and vampire capes.

You’ll find those items at Fantasy Costumes in Chicago too, but the store has a singular, massive inventory that’s the result of being in business year-round for 45 years. To visit Fantasy Costumes is to browse a museum of pop culture phenomena where everything is for sale or rent—a Garth wig from Wayne’s World (excellent!), Andy Warhol glasses, a Hello Kitty mascot head. That kind of selection helps the store stay open year-round and competitive against the seasonal pop-ups. No tricks here, just a half-century of knowing how to help people have fun.

Read more about Fantasy Costumes at The Distance. Happy Halloween!

Twice a year everyone who works at Basecamp comes to our Chicago office for a week to work and catch up with each other. Last week was our Fall meetup.

Here’s what happened:

• Shaun had a BBQ at his house for out-of town guests
• We welcomed 3 new employees: Conor, Eileen, and Sylvia
• Noah talked about customer demographics
• We had a company dinner at Half Acre Brewery
• JZ, Nick, and Zach talked about the Basecamp for iOS app
• Mig recapped last summer’s internship program
• James, Joan, Kristin, Natalie, and Sylvia shared customer feedback
• The Distance team planned the future of the magazine
• A few of us went to the David Bowie exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art
• The ladies of Basecamp met for a night out
• Jason and David celebrated the extraordinary efforts of Dan, Jim, and Nate
• Javan and Sam presented some cool new stuff they’re working on
• Jonas and Trevor shared some of their recent updates to Basecamp
• Will set up a room for us to try Oculus Rift
• Dan and Jamie presented what’s new in Android 5.0 Lollipop
• We had a pizza party and played games
• Noah demoed some new software to visualize data
• Zach from Inventables showed off their new desktop CNC: Carvey
• Some of us went to see a live taping of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

Because we’re spread out across states, countries, and time zones it’s nice to have the opportunity to get together in person every once in a while.

If there was a buddy cop movie starring the Geico gecko and the Aflac duck, I’m pretty sure it would outperform “Edge of Tomorrow” at the box office.

We love our anthropomorphized branding mascots. Shortly after Basecamp hatched its own such character, I was watching a big event on TV, and it seemed as though every product in every commercial had sprouted arms and legs. I guess we are part of the zeitgeist.

While I would love to take credit for inventing our Basecamp creature because he came out of the tip of my Micron, the fact is Jason asked me to create it, and it’s pretty hard to go wrong by adding humanoid features to the Basecamp logo. The results are bound to be adorable. Shawnimals had made a similar character months before with the Happy Sherpa, and our design intern this summer, Julia, also made a nice version. That said, I’m proud of the character I helped create, and I’m glad to see it gain momentum. What started as an experiment seems to have taken hold.


At Basecamp, our marketing is more intuitive than contrived. We don’t have dedicated marketing or sales staff. We pay attention to data but it doesn’t own us (take that Noah). I think the philosophy has been that the best marketing is a superior product. Basecamp sells itself, but it doesn’t hurt to have something cool to print on T-shirts. That is where this mascot comes into play. Internally we have been calling it “Basecampy,” and I heard someone call it “Mr. Basecamp” the other day. Let it be known, however, that it is genderless. It reproduces through binary fission. A creation myth is in the works. Basecampy may stick as the name, but we are open for suggestions. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Face Unlock is one of those features that surprises you. “Wow, this is pretty cool.” But after the novelty wears off some things become apparent: it doesn’t work very well, it isn’t very secure (it can be fooled), and you look kinda silly trying to unlock your phone with your face.

A few weeks ago John Gruber tweeted:

Question for Android users: is face recognition unlocking still a thing? http://t.co/xajitLBQLg

— John Gruber (@gruber) October 10, 2014

It reminded me of how Google creates these sci-fi things but doesn’t implement them very well. Often times features like these get buried or forgotten (is Google Goggles a thing still?).
Yesterday I watched Dieter Bohn’s review of the upcoming Nexus 6 device. I listened to his rundown of the hardware, the screen, how huge the device is, and how the camera’s pretty good. But there was one sentence in the review that I found puzzling. He said it so quickly—almost as an aside—that you could easily miss it:
“It’s got a clever feature if you’re looking at the lockscreen you can unlock the thing.”
What was that? Is he talking about Face Unlock? Is it different in Android Lollipop (the newest/next version of Android)?
I have a Nexus 5 with the latest Developer Preview, so I looked for some clues for this feature that Dieter Bohn mentioned. Sure enough, there it was in the Security Settings: Trusted Face.

Alongside trusted Bluetooth devices, you can set your face to automatically unlock your phone.

OK, so how’s this different than the Face Unlock of old? Android Lollipop doesn’t make you choose to lock your phone by PIN, Password, or Face. The Trusted Face feature is a layer of convenience. You can still unlock your device using a PIN, Password, or Pattern. If the device scans your face, it’s unlocked.
You might be saying, “I don’t get it. It sounds the same.” Here’s the thing. Android Lollipop now shows your notifications on the lockscreen.

The key difference is: you’re looking at the lockscreen to scan your notifications now. It’s during this time that Android scans your face!
When the device sees your face, this is what the lock screen icon does:

Now your phone’s conveniently unlocked for you without you having to think about it.
This seems like such a minor thing, but it shows the care and attention Google has been paying to Android’s design recently. They took this technology (face recognition), and finally applied it in a useful way. It’s a subtle thing, but the difference between “staring at your phone to unlock it” and “reading a notification unlocks it” is a huge difference.

Last March the iPad team asked me to design some custom loading screen spinners for the Basecamp app. None of these have made it into the app yet, but I thought it would be fun to share some of the tests.

My relay team goes by the name “Alaska Golddiggers,” because race officials frown on us calling ourselves the more accurate “Team Shitshow.”

For a group of otherwise competent women, we’ve managed to screw up a lot during our annual participation in the Klondike Trail of ’98 International Road Relay, a 10-leg, 175-kilometer race that follows the trail of the gold rush stampeders from Skagway, Alaska to Whitehorse, Yukon. Past oopsies include failing to renew passports on time, forgetting our running shoes, traveling with 11 people on an RV that sleeps 8, misestimating the correct start time so our final runner doesn’t have a finish line to cross, and filling the RV’s holding tank to capacity and then some. (Glad you asked — why yes, that is as gross it sounds!)

We’ve always planned the event either via email or our Facebook group, which worked OK, although details always inevitably fell through the cracks. This year we switched to Basecamp, and the consensus was that planning went much more smoothly. (Full disclosure: Basecamp sponsored us this year, so I didn’t have to work too hard to convince anyone to get on board. Thanks Basecamp!)
We used a to-do list to discuss and assign race legs — they vary from 9 kilometers but steep to 25.6 kilometers but relatively flat. Another to-do list helped determine what everyone would bring to the pre-race washers tourney fundraiser, and yet another served as our packing list. (Item #1: Passport!!!)

We used the hell out of discussions, and it was so nice to have everything in once place, to refer back to: Who is bringing camp chairs? Don’t buy mint; I have some in my garden! What is everyone’s drivers license number to provide to the RV rental company? No, don’t make hummus; we always bring a ton and no one ever eats it.

“I think one one of the coolest things about this year was just how absolutely stress-free everything was,” one teammate said. “I think a lot of the advanced communication set us up to understand our boundaries, how things would work, and to get to know each other in some cases. When it came time for the actual road trip it was like pushing play and just sitting back.”

Perhaps much of that is that after six Klondikes we’ve begun to learn from our mistakes, but Basecamp also definitely helped everyone stay on the same page. We still emailed and texted a bit, but for everything we needed a record of, it went in Basecamp. Of course there were still a few bumps in the road — we neglected to outfit our leg #1 runner with a timing chip; we got rained on a little. Whatever. We still had a blast, and it was the easiest, most relaxed trip we’ve had to date.
And no one felt guilty wasting any hummus.

This morning I needed an app, but I had no idea where to start. I knew what the app should do, but did it exist? Here’s my story.

The Problem
We received this in the mail this morning. It’s a ticket warning issued by the City of Chicago.

I know what you’re gonna say. See, we do follow the speed limit. The thing is—this was issued to my better half. And she is way more cognizant of the speed limits around the city. What probably happened was the speed limit was 35 mph then in the speed camera zone it dropped to 30 mph. The City of Chicago issues you a ticket when you’re going 5 mph over the limit. At least that’s what I think happened. Either way, it’s beside the point:
There must be some type of app that warns you of these speed zones.
Where to start?
I Googled “chicago speed camera app.”

Interestingly, the first two results are apps for Android. Not sure if Google knows that I use Android. Well, of course they do. Anyway, awesome! Here are two apps that I can check out right away.
The first result
The first app, Speed Camera Alerts gets great reviews. No brainer right?

Except that it looks too European for me. Not the design, but too European in the vein of “Are they going to have Chicago speed camera information?” I thought, well, let me check out the second result…
The second result
The second app is called Chicago Speed Camera. You can’t name an app any more obvious than that. Again no brainer right?

Except it only had 18 reviews. The first two reviews weren’t great. And there was a huge all caps disclaimer on the app description.
Going back to the Google results
So I went back to the Google results to look at the 3rd link. No one does that! (Except for me.) It’s an article called How to avoid all those new speed cameras.
Interestingly, the article is about a 53-year-old local company Cobra Electronics and their smartphone app called iRadar. I’m about to check out that app, but this quote catches my eye:

The app update comes just as Cobra Electronics faces tough competition, including from popular apps such as Trapster and Waze. Trapster has 16 million users; Waze has 50 million; and Cobra’s laser radar-detector version has 1 million.

Waze is a competitor for this app? I have some experience with Waze because Google sends me Waze alerts if there’s an accident on the highway. I’m not a Waze user, and I really don’t have any experience with Waze other than those notifications Google sends me.

I remember seeing a couple friends’ homescreens a while back. Yeah I know, that’s creepy. Anyway, I think I saw the Waze icon on there. So I ask them via Instant Message:

He’s an iPhone person. So I ask my other friend who has Android. I thought I saw Waze on his screen too (yes, I know creepy). How’s the Android app?

I asked them both about speed cameras and how Waze works in alerting you. Waze seemed like the app I was looking for, but there was one small problem. For Waze to work, you have to open the app before you drive. Then when you’re done driving, you have to stop the app.
I asked my Android friend about turning it on automatically by listening to Bluetooth. He replied, “yeah. or, you can just get into your car and turn on waze :/” I don’t want to remember to do that though. Well, actually I know myself too well. I’ll definitely forget to do that.
Surely there must be some way to automate this?
When I get into the car, my phone automatically connects to the stereo via Bluetooth. I figured there must be a way to launch Waze by listening to the Bluetooth connection.
I’ve heard a lot about IFTTT. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem capable of listening to Bluetooth connections. I’ve also heard a lot about Tasker. Tasker is one of those apps Android users will tell you makes Android awesome. I’m sure it’s awesome, but I just want to do one simple thing: Listen for Bluetooth and launch an app.
One of the nerdier things I do (I do a lot of nerdy things, but this is up there) is listen to the All About Android podcast. Every show they have a segment where they review apps. One of the hosts mentioned an app called Trigger that was positioned as a simple version of “Tasker”.
I checked out Trigger’s product page, but it wasn’t clear if it did exactly what I needed. Luckily, I found a review on YouTube.

It works perfectly!
After that initial path of Googling for an answer, I have a setup that works: I get into the car, the phone pairs with car’s Bluetooth, and Trigger launches the Waze app. Now I get alerts like, “Speed Camera Ahead” while I’m driving.
OK so what’s the point?
I wanted to share this with you because often times when we’re marketing something we’re looking for a Silver Bullet. One awesome spot or placement that will get people to use your product.
Look at my experience. I had a need—find a speed camera app. Searching on Google gave me 2 clear app results, but I didn’t end up downloading those. The Google result did get me an article about another app, but I ended up asking friends on IM about one of the competing apps because it was mentioned in the article. Their personal recommendation got me to download the app and set up an account. I wanted to improve my experience with the app by automating it based on my car’s Bluetooth connection. I remember hearing about that app on a podcast. Then I watched a review about the app on YouTube. Now I have the perfect solution from all these disparate unrelated sources. That’s pretty fascinating.
If I was to pick the most powerful point in my decision-making process it would be the recommendations of Waze by my friends. It would take a huge leap of faith to install the app and create an account for something I wasn’t sure would work. It was ultimately because of their recommendations that I chose Waze. But I wouldn’t have known that Waze could do what I wanted if it wasn’t for Google either.
One more thing
I started out by saying the ticket warning was issued to my wife. The problem is, she has an iPhone. Waze will still work for her, but now I have to look into automating Bluetooth, etc on iOS now… Any recommendations?

For the last ten months at Basecamp I have been the guy that draws stuff. After making occasional contributions at 37signals over the years, they tapped me to make hand drawn images for the Basecamp marketing site that first appeared in February. Since then my drawings have crept into the app itself, into email blasts, onto banners at Pitchfork, all up in The Distance, plastered on the walls of the office, and into several employee’s avatars. We came up with a creative contract that allows me time to work on my other career as an artist while still providing substantial input at Basecamp.

Continued…

A few months ago I started at Basecamp. It’s my dream job. I get to work with the people I’ve dreamed of working with, on the product I dreamed of working on. It didn’t come easy though, it took me a couple tries to get their attention—apparently that’s a thing for designers here :).

Getting the job

My first attempt ended pretty much before it even began, I submitted an application and simply never heard back. The second time (a few years later) I sent an email and heard back within about 20 minutes. I couldn’t believe it! 10 days later I was working on the most important (and thus stressful) project I’d ever encountered—the project that would determine whether or not I got hired.

For 18 days, from 5am till 11pm (and often in my dreams), I thought about very little beyond this project and the potential of getting the job. Somehow I pulled it off, and they hired me.

Holy cow, I got hired! I couldn’t really believe it at first though. In fact as I went to quit my old job, I had to triple check my emails to make sure this was really happening. I even remember receiving a company credit card in the mail one day, and breathing a sigh of relief—nobody sends a company card to someone they haven’t hired, right?

Then I started the job. Oh my goodness, I started the job! Again, it was surreal to actually be working with these people at this company. I was finally living my dream. That is, until I wasn’t.

My dream became a bit of a nightmare

Within a month or two I felt like things were going south. I was unhappy, extremely stressed out, and ridden with guilt. I had worked so hard for this job, but somehow I was feeling miserable in it.

I worried all the time that I wasn’t a good enough designer, that I wasn’t funny enough, that my teammates were regretting their decision to hire me. Each day I felt panicked to put out work that was good enough to stack up next to my new peers. I wouldn’t allow myself to be one of the team—I felt like I just wasn’t good enough for the team.

I was psycho-analyzing every email, every IM, and every word uttered over Skype. And the worst part was that I just bottled it all up, and tried to put on a happy face.

I felt like I should just be satisfied with what I had (it was my dream job after all), and that talking to anyone about it would just make me look ungrateful.

Outside of work, friends and family would ask about how my great new job was going, and I’d smile and lie. I told them it was great, that I was so happy, and that there was nowhere else I’d rather be. I hated those conversations.

Opening the door to be vulnerable

Eventually I considered talking to Jason about what was going on. I knew I should talk to him about it, but I was too worried about what he might think of me if I did. One day, over a Skype call, Jason could tell something was up. He waited a day and asked about it the next morning over IM.

Jason: Feeling good?
Jason: Seemed like yesterday was a tough day back for you.

As I read those words, I could see the door opening up for me to talk. I sent my response:

Me: yeah, I’d love to talk a bit more about it if you’ve got time

As soon as I hit [enter] I felt this huge sense of relief that the cat would finally be out of the bag.

We had a call and I talked a lot. Jason listened patiently, he was understanding, sympathetic, and encouraging. Somehow weeks of worry, obsession, and generally awful feelings were unravelled in a few minutes of candid conversation.

As I’ve thought about that conversation and tried to figure out what caused the change, two things seem to have made the biggest difference:

1. Leveling up a relationship with vulnerability

When I think about the people I’ve gotten close to, or the moments where I really connect with someone, there’s usually some vulnerability at play. One or both of us share something that isn’t easy to share—and that builds trust and respect in an incredible way.

That call with Jason really wasn’t easy for me—and he knew that. When I trusted him with that vulnerability, I leveled up our relationship. Now I trust him a lot more, and it’ll be that much easier to be honest with him the next time I need to talk.

Even cooler though, is that Jason leveled us up again by telling me about his own self-doubt, and how he’s often just figuring it out as he goes. Suddenly he was a little more human to me, and that allowed me to trust him even more.

With that new trust in hand, Jason told me that he’d be the first to let me know if there was any problems with me or my work. And I believe him.

2. Shining a bright light in a dark corner

One tricky thing about self-doubt is that I tend to want to hide it and keep it to myself. I want to stash those feelings far far away in a deep dark drawer in the basement corner where nobody will ever see them. But that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. You see, self-doubt thrives in dark, musty places, it feeds on seclusion.

Talking about my feelings of inadequacy, and sharing my fears with someone gave me hope. The fresh perspective I received from Jason was like shining a UV lamp on a vampire of self-doubt—it just couldn’t hold up.

With just a flash of light, that monster withered up, my confidence was restored, and I could be myself again.
———
So it turns out I wasn’t a horrible designer, my team didn’t regret hiring me, and there wasn’t a problem with my job. My pain was self-inflicted.

Fortunately the treatment was simple. I just had to push myself to be vulnerable, to trust in my teammates, and to open up and let a little light in. There’s no more need to worry about my standing with the team—I’ve got their honesty and mine to do that job now.

So from here on out, when I feel anxious, distraught, or discouraged, I’m gonna swallow my pride, take a risk, be vulnerable, and talk to someone about it. I’m going to remember that I’m not alone—we all feel things like this. We can trust each other to understand, to lend an ear, and to offer some kind encouragement.

Here’s to getting things out in the open, acknowledging feelings, and being willing to be vulnerable with another human being.
-Conor