

37Signals' product websites redesigned - csbartus
http://37signals.com/

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idont
So many font types, font sizes, font weights, colors... Too messy for me...
Maybe I am too Swiss... ;)

~~~
puns
I think it's great. There are many fonts and colors and variation, but the
design still has clear sections (short product descriptions, detailed about
company blurb, client videos, buzz etc.), and more important, there are points
in the design that grab your attention and suck you in; these are the big
icons at the top with large speech bubbles and the "A Better Way To Work"
heading. This means as you glance over the page your eyes will find a place to
land, and I think the copy itself is very well done -- short and to the point
-- which means I'm likely to actually read it.

One thing that always bothered me is the navigation 37signals tend to use.
It's stuck at the very top of the page and is set in a very small font size.
Current locations are also not highlighted on some pages. Perhaps they don't
rely on it at all and instead focus on getting people to click on calls to
action inside the content.

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gry
It is a big improvement over what they had; I think they present what they do
now more than ever: the black box says we help work -> via four products.

I expect a website to do one, maybe two things well. I'm a hard sell on three.
The middle doesn't do much for me. It's a content stack and I have to _study_
it to glean meaning. Buzz, about, client vids, etc. My gut says this is
filler. Now given the last few days with Google's data/design approach, I'd
love to see a heatmap and numbers. :)

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fuzzmeister
I think the main black box draws the eye a little too effectively. I have
trouble focusing on other parts of the page.

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bmelton
Wow are you ever right.

I just came back to HN to post a similar remark -- it's damn near impossible
to read anything outside that box.

Or perhaps we're both deficient in some unique way that makes us susceptible
to black (or near black) boxes.

~~~
ptn
Make that three of us. Even when I'm looking at Campfire, I'm still reading
the black box through the corner of my eye.

Also, I think it looks like the second half and the first half were designed
by totally different guys. The first is really colorful, which helps tell the
sections apart, but the second is nothing like that, just their plain old
vanilla. And at the end...wham! The black box of death again.

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dmix
The footer, that was there before the redesign, has always been my favourite
part. The big colourful icons standout.

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petercooper
I was really encouraged by the HighriseHQ design of several weeks ago, along
with the blog posts about the redesign but... now the real deal is here, it's
clutterville :(

Very difficult to scan. Perhaps it'll look better when I get back on my
desktop but on this 1024 pixel width netbook it's just a smush of poorly
separated text.

Anyway, it's not that important, I guess. They have good products and a
supportive userbase. They don't need a slick site to sell what they have.. and
if you look at the sites of most Fortune 500 companies, they're usually poorly
designed so perhaps they're aiming for that club.

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bdotdub
How is this news?

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jrockway
Well, they _made a website_ with _ruby on rails_ and without _venture
capital_. Totally awesome!

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systems
I think this is a bad design, I don't like it. But then I never liked their
products either!

Different people like different things, this is why I guess we have different
firms offering variations of the same products.

They say they have 3,000,000 customers so I guess at least the 3% (random
percentage of decision makers) who forced the other 97% (the team) likes it!

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dshah
I'm hoping Jason and crew write a blog article describing what they changed
(and why). Would make for some great reading.

~~~
jfornear
They have a few posts related to this (also posted to HN, if I recall):

[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1582-design-in-
progress-c...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1582-design-in-progress-
choosing-the-right-product)

[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1622-design-in-
progress-p...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1622-design-in-progress-
product-bubbles)

[http://www.37signals.com/svn/images/37s-preview-b3faa2088b4e...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/images/37s-preview-b3faa2088b4e609877c70605f65efa2d.jpg)

I'm surprised this made it to the top of HN, though. This is all really old
news to me, and I wouldn't consider myself a 37signals fanboy.

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KWD
Too busy and too much information is my initial thought. I'd also probably
have the two-column video section switched to the right instead of left. Also
to me, the vids are the fluff of the page, and makes the product information I
want to read harder to find.

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halo
The bottom 2 product names are cut-off on a maximised browser window in
Firefox at 1280x800 (i.e. a 13" laptop), which is quite a big problem.

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rms
I have my fonts sized larger than default and forced to Verdana so they stick
out of some of the boxes.

~~~
BSeward
I'm seeing it on Eee Linux, which lacks a number of 'web-safe' fonts, and if
it did have them it would have no idea how to properly display them. I think
we rightly fall in edge cases not worth supporting, alongside IE6 (
[http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php?browser=ie6&url...](http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php?browser=ie6&url=37signals.com)
and [http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-
phasin....](http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.html)
).

It wouldn't be a ton of trouble to make the text bubbles expand to fit the
text (one more div and splitting the background images, I suspect but won't
confirm). But their goal was, I assume, to have a well-aligned, eye-catching
2x2 grid, and they chose not to support rare-ish cases where that wouldn't be
what was rendered rather than cluttering their markup.

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antidaily
funky alignment in the "also from..." section. ah, that's better:
<http://i43.tinypic.com/mwqoeg.png>

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sscheper
I think this is one of the cases where the guys are so into technology/design,
they're constantly changing it because they have nothing better to do.

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briansmith
Their design inspiration: <http://www.parrotsecrets.com/>

