Yeah I'm not sure how much validating they do. My opinion of their design team is that they seem more like front-end engineers than designers, and I'm not a fan of DHH's insistence that designers must know how to code, but I digress. Their process seems like it works well for their company, and I have to appreciate that DHH has been an outspoken leader for remote work. He's just not someone I look to for design thinking.

I learned this all from a twitter conversation, but I was able to find an interesting writeup on their processes at Basecamp: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-structure-our-work-and-teams-at-basecamp/

I think the thing that interests me most here is their cycles, with incorporated down time. Sounds nice!

I don't get the sense that this is much of a rebrand - they've just changed the logo and their color palette, but I suppose Basecamp has always had a fairly light and utilitarian brand. They're definitely not a design driven organization.

I learned somewhat recently that they don't do mockups at all – their process is to design as the designers write the markup for the page, and frankly the outcome is that their visual design leaves something to be desired, imo. There's a disconnect for me here when I'm reading about how basecamp simplifies and streamlines your work process on a cluttered and visually noisy page.