First and foremost, we approached this project out of a necessity to better organize the ever growing mountain of information and resources that our site provides our users. We were very cognizant of the fact that if we embarked on this path, we had to carefully consider how to balance our playful image with our powerful product. MailChimp helps 600,000 people send 40 million emails a day–that’s a serious business.

A few months ago we redesigned 37signals.com — our main site. I want to share with you a few iterations and permutations I created along the way. I’ll also give a little insight into the discussions we had about each design: what we saved for the next version and what we axed because it wasn’t working.