Warren Weixler, along with business partner Adam Crain, runs a 2 year old design firm, DBD Studio. Below he tells us about how they use Basecamp.
DBD specializes in creating commercial & residential architecture, custom furniture & products, and graphics. Not only are we interested in design, but how we can make that design more affordable, efficient, and functional for the end user.
As the company began to grow at an exponential pace out of a home office, I realized that it was becoming more difficult to do what we were ultimately hired to do: coordinate. Without coordination of drawings, materials, vendors and clients our company wouldn't function. DBD ultimately needed Basecamp, we just didn’t know it yet.
DBD's portfolio.
The design field is a very digital business and DBD needed a place to put all our “stuff” that we could access from home, office, vacation, Europe, etc. For the longest time I thought that was some type of expensive advanced hardware. I was all wrong.
We stumbled across Basecamp in December of 2009. After 10 minutes with the free trial, we were hooked. We are design freaks to the bone and love tools that are customizable, slick, simple, and no frills. Basecamp = Win. We accidentally referred to Basecamp as 'Homebase', for the first week or two, and just maybe it was subconscious but that is exactly what 37signals did for us, they gave us a home base. Basecamp does everything we need it to do and nothing less.
The message board saves me from CC’ing every time I email and keeps messages keyed to their respective project. Writeboards are ideal for our collaboration on design and writings. The to-do list and milestones replaced our calendars, and the file system we abuse everyday and it keeps coming back for more. We have slowly phased our clients into using Basecamp with us and as a result some of them have entertained becoming Basecamp users themselves.
