After a flurry of scrapped ideas and illustrations that may never see the light of day, I survived my first month designing at 37signals.
Joining the team in the heat of relaunching our flagship product, it comes as no surprise that everything has been hands-on and fast-paced.
My first week
- Monday → New computer day. (13” MacBook Air + Thunderbolt Display)
- Tuesday → Remove my Git and Ruby training wheels with Trevor.
- Wednesday → Screenshare with JZ, brush up on SCSS and CoffeeScript.
- Thursday → Redesign SvN for mobile. Commit code. Beer.
A typical day
An emphasis on writing
As my mega-serious chart notes, designers here spend a lot of time writing. While working on the Basecamp marketing site, I once made the mistake of sharing progress without real copy. My first feedback? Rework the words. It was a good reminder that design weighs first on “What does this say?” before “What does this look like?”
Working in the browser
Oddly enough, Photoshop and Illustrator are my least used tools. Most of my dirty work has been in TextMate with Web Inspector, prototyping actual pages the team can poke at in their own browsers. Working this way has been fast and productive. You should give it a try.
Embracing remote working
Even though I live closest to the Chicago HQ, I still explore remote working. From the kitchen to our theater, I’ve sat in every imaginable spot in our office. On days when I’m not at the office, I surround myself with strangers at some of my favorite coffee shops in the city. Changing the scenery every day has helped work not feel like “work.”
It’s been a fun and challenging ride since my 1-week design challenge. At 32 employees strong, I’m excited to report that the principles laid out in Rework still hold true.
After starting I joked, “Hopefully I don’t break too many things.” In return:
So, here’s to adding spark and breaking (more) things.
Mig Reyes wrote this on Mar 20 2012 There are 16 comments.
Bruno Bernardino 20 Mar 12
Looks and sounds interesting, motivating and extremely inspiring to work with you guys.
You’ve all done a great job and I only wish you keep on that track.
Cheers
Terry Sutton 20 Mar 12
I’d like to hear about how you’ve used Ruby in the last month.
How much experience you’ve had with Ruby specifically, or programming in general. Same with Coffeescript.
Thanks!
Excel_Geek 20 Mar 12
Jason’s gem reminds me of something I had a great trainer once tell me: “Sometimes you gotta break some $h1t before you really know how to fix it.” Indeed.
Finch 20 Mar 12
Sounds like Thursday ended well. Great work
Pavel Druzyak 21 Mar 12
What about +1 button? http://www.google.com/+1/button/
Michael 21 Mar 12
Interesting. Have you seen your writing ability begin to change yet?
alan 21 Mar 12
Hello Mig, does 37 use any CSS framework like Blueprint or Bootstrap to prototype in the browser?
JF 21 Mar 12
Alan: We don’t.
Terry Sutton 21 Mar 12
Mig! You can’t post and then not check back!
Alex P 21 Mar 12
I wonder how you’re using iA Writer? Is there any kind of collaboration involved? Only for the writing and editing process —collecting, storing and sharing the text in other formats or on other places?
Glad you survived your first month!
Thanks, Alex
MR 21 Mar 12
Terry: I haven’t touched any Ruby within our apps as I’m primarily focused on the public-facing design of 37signals. I have a foundation in object-oriented programming, though I like to put my efforts more on design.
Alex: I use iA Writer to jot down feedback, draft copy for the marketing sites, and also used it to write this very SvN post. We use the new Basecamp here, so a lot of edits and iterations are made in Text Documents (after we’ve pasted our work from iA Writer into Basecamp.)
Pascal Laliberte 23 Mar 12
Great job on SvN Mobile. I was looking forward to that.
Would it be possible to add an apple-touch-icon so we can get a nice home screen shortcut?
Mario 24 Mar 12
Very inspiring. I should start practicing it as well…
Thanks
Mario 24 Mar 12
One more reason to buy myself a MacBook Air :) waiting for the launching of the rumored 15” model though
FL Health 26 Mar 12
I couldn’t agree with you more Mario! MacBooks are the best.
Simon 27 Mar 12
Is SvN for mobile available yet? If so how, different url? Renders normally on my Android.
This discussion is closed.