Redesigned: The new 37signals.com

I always enjoy 37signals' copy, but the one that feels a little odd is "Backpack is like a beautifully organized closet for your internal communications."<p>So... it's a backpack that's like a closet, but a beautifully-organized one. And my internal communications go in this closet. Huh.<p>Anyone else find that a little funky?

I kind of prefer their previous design actually, though I'm sure they put plenty of thought and research into the new one.<p>One thing I find awkward are the rollovers of the 4 buttons with the red arrow pointing me up to read the related description. I found it unnatural for me to look at the buttons, rollover one, and then look up to read the description, and then look back down, rollover another button, and then look back up for the description. My eyes kept going down, then up, then down, then up.<p>One option I might rather have seen was having the buttons flip around revealing the simple description, while keeping the more detailed description above, perhaps allowing room for screenshots of the products above.

They're just trying to distance themselves from these guys: <a href="http://www.73primenumbers.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.73primenumbers.com/</a> who have taken "do less" and "simplicity" to places where not even 37 signals dares to tread.

If you want to see the old design, this site is still using it: <a href="http://startupschool.com.au/" rel="nofollow">http://startupschool.com.au/</a>

I like this design, especially for a company page. It actually feels like a print magazine ad that I would actually stop and read.

I love this design. It really resonates with me! The whole thing feels a bit like a slide deck which I like. If you scroll correctly you get a nice bit of information per "slide" but you don't actually click through a silly slide deck. One of the arguments I'm reading is "too much scrolling" but I think that's incorrect -- the design makes you <i>want</i> to scroll and the argument against scrolling is that people don't want to/won't do so!<p>All in all I think this model could be a really effective way of presenting to-the-point, minimalistic information.

New website looks like Scammy Ebook 2.0, you know those yellowish scam/drity/spam marketing ebook sale websites, somehow that's what it reminded me.

<p><pre><code> It must have taken quite a bit of thought to get the links at the foot of the page to line up</code></pre>

Office: <a href="http://37signals.com/office" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/office</a>

I liked the last design much more. The colored quotes over each product gave a nice personality to the site; compared with the old one, I feel like I'm looking at a black &#38; white channel now: less color = less intrigue/excitement. The font-size inconsistency creates noise in the organization and message of the content.

I quite like it. I love the movement towards simple, playful interface with some nice content to chew on without having to dive in. It seems they are treating 37signals.com more as a brand destination then a product launch point, which I think fits.

Multiple comments have suggested that this page has elements reminiscent of scam-related web pages, of the type where you are clearly being sold to.<p>Warning flags that come to mind: overuse of large fonts, very long pages with repetition of content within the page, copy clearly designed to sell (with particular emphasis on benefits to you the reader), big red arrows that guide your attention<p>I consistently warn family members to be wary of claims made by organizations using these tactics. The reason I do that is because they seem to work.<p>Does anyone have access to data or a link to research on these tactics?

I would have loved to see the new website design while I was eating lunch today, but it crashed my iPad Safari browser -- TWICE!<p>The first time I visited the site, my browser crashed. I didn't think much of it. Hey, things crash. I started Safari back up and I was still on the 37 blogs site (where I was before the crash, when I clicked on the 37 Signals link). Cool, I thought. Safari remembered my place and all my other windows were saved too.<p>But the second time I clicked through to visit 37 Signals Safari crashed and lost all of my other window information. That's a bummer because I still had some stories I wanted to read.<p>37 Signals, please test on an iPad.

I don't want to tell Jason how to do his job, hell, he knows more about this stuff than I do but I'm really not liking it.<p>Too much scrolling (which I thought was established as bad in Web Design 101 though I'd love to hear otherwise as 37signals have ignored this for a while), and the lower sections manage to feel crowded despite having white space in abundance (possibly due to using fonts as large as 18.5 pts for paragraphs of text), the font sizes seem to be almost at random section by section.<p>It's nice that it doesn't look like every other website but beyond slight originality it doesn't do it for me.

The new site crashes hard with Safari on iPad 3.2.<p>If I manually type in 37signals.com it loads fine, but if I follow a link to 37signals.com, either from that blog posting or from Google, it crashes Safari every time.

Huge improvement over the last iteration IMO, which felt packed with too much <i>stuff</i>. It was also hard to find the SvN blog link in the old version.

Clean, 'simple' and fast. The only part I'm not loving is how when you mouse over the product the arrow and description change, that feels unnatural. I do love how the design embraces the fact that users scroll down websites to read content. that part worked nicely. Lastly, what's the call to action, "visit the site" what good is that? What about "get started today"... something to worth AB testing.

"A better way to work with the people you work with every day."<p>Is it me, or does that scan really badly. Is it even grammatically valid?

i think they dedicated way too much space for the book

The font looks terrible and jagged to me on Chrome. It seems almost amateurish as a result.

This reminds me of parrotsecrets.com, and the other ebook promo sites out there that bombard you with content to sell you something. Though, this is much more appealing visually.

Interestingly, the "new design" looks a lot like the one the "old design" replaced. Obviously some background A/B testing winning out here.