When we were building the new Basecamp, we wanted the foundation to be built on clean, modern underpinnings to take advantage of all the new wonderful features of HTML5. That meant we have to drop support for older browsers, like IE8, that have little or poor support for the HTML5 technology we are using to make Basecamp awesome for everyone.

But, have no fear! We realize that a lot of people are stuck with IE8 (sometimes even IE7 or, yikes, 6), so we made sure that Chrome Frame works with Basecamp. Chrome Frame is available for IE 6-9 on Windows machines and can usually be installed without admin access.

If you’re stuck with an older version of Explorer, check out Chrome Frame and get yourself a Basecamp account.

One of the super-cool benefits of working at 37signals is a membership in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). We get fresh fruits and veggies at the farmer’s market or delivered to our doors, which encourages us and our families to cook and eat healthier — and the brain food helps us stay at the top of our mental game too!

It also feels great to support local farmers. We’re spread out all over the place, so the contents of our CSA boxes reflect what’s local and in season where we live.

Clockwise from top left: A recent delivery from Greenling in Austin, Texas; Javan’s Romanesco broccoli from Sunseed Farm in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Eron’s winter veggies from Coon Rock Farm in Hillsborough, North Carolina; and Ann’s fan dance with lettuce from Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks in Chicago.

My favorite part of belonging to a CSA is the surprise that comes with opening a new box and seeing what’s new — it’s turned me into a more adventurous cook.

A few of my CSA-based creations: grapefruit-avocado salad, sesame broccoli with peanut sauce, Swiss chard frittata and an avocado-orange smoothie.

Soup is perfect for using up a bunch of perishables all at once!

Shaun’s vegetarian chili, and Will’s wife’s veggie-and-ham soup

Kristin made a pie with apples from her CSA last fall, and I made a sweet potato meringue pie with mine.

Hey, it doesn’t have to be 100% healthy all the time, right?

Michael, 37signals’ resident foodie and showoff, whips up amazing creations with his CSA goodies from Irv & Shelly — I’m considering moving to Chicago so he’ll feed me more often.

Michael’s masterpieces, clockwise from top left: red quinoa with roasted cauliflower, dried cranberries, and toasted pine nuts; spinach tomato scramble with Sunday bacon; parsnip and potato latkes; mushroom ginger soup with hato mugi; squash and chickpea Moroccan stew with hand-rolled couscous; and poached eggs with sautéed spinach, toasted pecans, and parmesan.

If you’re interested in CSAs in your area, check out localharvest.org. Bon appetit!

It is said that the discovery of The Golden Section in Classical Greece was the result of the quest to identify the ideal proportion and balance in life and art. Throughout history and to this day The Golden Section has inspired the work of countless biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, and psychologists. We here at 37signals are no exception. When we began designing the new Basecamp we knew that adhering to these principles would result in software with pleasing, harmonious proportions.

Take the Projects Screen, for example. The tightly aligned Project Cards layout fits precisely inside a perfectly proportioned Golden Rectangle. Plotting the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144) on a horizontal and vertical axis produces a mathematical spiral that the user’s eye subliminally follows to land on the first card in the group, an ideal and harmonious place to begin their work.

Furthermore, you’ll notice that each Project Card displays up to ten people per card. This again is by design, as 10 is the sum of the first three prime numbers (2, 3, 5). More over, the shapes of the avatars are circles, which is unanimously an infinitely perfect shape. But we couldn’t leave such an important element of the design just to chance. Here’s how we created perfect circles for the new default avatars:

Starting with a square, duplicate it and rotate 45º. The difference between the base line of the original square and the apex of the rotated square equals the diameter of the circle. To put it another way, when a line AB is sectioned at point C, it does so in such a way that AC is the same ratio to AB as CB is to AC: AC:AB = CB:AC.

Projects designed for people

One of the best things about the new Basecamp is the single-page projects. With everything about your project in one place, this is where the bulk of work in Basecamp gets done.

Because this page would be used primarily by people, we studied the proportions of the human body. By using the body as our inspiration we think we’ve created a page that fades into the background so people can focus on their work. Just like that OXO Good Grips potato peeler feels so great in your hand, the new Basecamp is like an extension of your own body. In fact, if you shine a black light on the new Basecamp, you can see the precise anthropomorphic principles in use:

We think the new Basecamp is our best work yet. It’s a return to our roots. To the basics. To the foundations of human civilization. This kind of attention to detail isn’t easy and it’s no accident. After all, 37 is a prime number, too.

About three weeks ago we launched the all new Basecamp, and it’s been an exciting few weeks.

Since I’m a numbers kind of guy, I wanted to share some things I’ve seen in looking at the new Basecamp that are particularly exciting:

• This has been our strongest product launch ever. The new Basecamp is our fifth “big” product launch, and it’s our strongest yet in terms of signups in the period immediately after launch. With two weeks in the books, we had more than 3x more signups than we had in the same period after our last brand new product launch (for Highrise back in 2007). If you go all the way back to Basecamp’s original launch in 2004, signups for the new Basecamp were more than 30 times higher.


• We’ve brought in lots of new customers. About a third of new Basecamp accounts immediately after launch were from people who migrated their existing account, and about half were from people who previously held some sort of 37signals account before. While we’re thrilled to see so many of our loyal customers enjoying the new Basecamp, we’re even more excited to see so many new people trying Basecamp for the first time.


• Usage is fantastic. On a per account basis, new Basecamp accounts are creating twice as many projects and todo items as on Basecamp Classic, as well as more attachments, messages, comments, calendar events, and more.


• We have a great new marketing site. Jamie, Mig, and Jason F. really knocked it out the park with our new public site at basecamp.com. We’ve sustained substantially higher traffic levels from all kinds of sources more than two weeks after launch, and conversion rate is up 76%. We’re always testing new ideas here, but the early results are bright.


• Basecamp Classic continues to perform well. Plenty of existing customers continue to use Basecamp Classic. Retention rates haven’t dipped, and usage levels are right where they were before we launched the new Basecamp. This is great news – our strategy of maintaining two separate Basecamps (Classic and new) seems to be working so far with no ill effects.

We’re excited and encouraged by the first few weeks of the all new Basecamp. We have lots of great improvements planned for it in the coming weeks and months – we’re hard at work on a few already.

If you don’t have an account, get started with a 45-day free trial now, or join us for a free introductory class about the new Basecamp.

One of the joys of building the new Basecamp was using the new Basecamp to quickly iterate on a design problem. Because I’m in Colorado and the rest of the team lives elsewhere, we rely on a combination of tools to share files and work through ideas. And while we might have used Campfire in the past, we now use Basecamp messages to quickly work through ideas and keep the conversation focused.

During one design session, I worked with Jason and Ryan on a particularly thorny problem on the calendar: notifying people about a new event.

We’re finally ready to unveil the API for the new Basecamp. The documentation lives on Github and we encourage developers to help us improve it with pull requests.

The new API covers most of what’s available in the web UI and whatever is currently not there, we’ll be sure to add in the future. You can create projects, add people to those projects, work the calendar, upload files, the works.

We’re really excited to see where people will take the API. Especially the Events API that allows you to poll for changes since a given timestamp. This should make it easy to have local notification style integrations and much easier for people who want to build synching services.

So have at it!

What if every question you asked your customers was multiple choice? And every question had an “I’m confused” option. How often would your customers choose that option?

If your whole business was laid out flat – every product, every promise, every price, every rule, every condition all on one surface – and you superimposed a heat map layer over it, where would the confusion hot spots be?

Everything you do as a business includes multiple choices for your customers. It doesn’t matter if you give them the choices – they have the choices. Features, benefits, prices, promises, support, etc. They can love it, hate it, be indifferent, etc. But they can also be confused. And “I’m confused” is the worst option of all. If your customers are confused, you’re in deep trouble. “I give up, unhappily” is next.

This is what clarity is all about. It’s about eliminating “I’m confused” answers. Lots of people think simplicity is the opposite of confusion (“It’s confusing, let’s make this simpler”). It’s not. The opposite of confusion is clarity.