I’m a sucker for “behind the scenes” articles on how other people made design decisions. They’re usually accompanied with neatly packaged lessons for everyone to walk away with.

Designing—especially during the early exploration phases—is anything but neat. There’s plenty of debates, countless iterations, and drive-by critiques.

I’m starting a new series here on Signal v. Noise called “Design Discussions.” Every so often, I’ll take a page out of our company Basecamp account and share the entire discussion behind a design project we’ve done. They’ll be raw and unedited. They might be full of insight, or they might be incredibly boring and expose the weirdness and silliness of each of our coworkers. That’s fine, too!

Either way, I won’t overly explain the reasoning behind what we were doing, nor will I share a top-ten list of things you should try in your own project. You’ll get an uncut backstage pass to the conversations that took our projects from A to B.

So, let’s start with something we had fun with. Around this time last year, we were Becoming Basecamp. With so many employees, it was high time for us to have a new identity, and that included business cards. (Chances for free lunches via fishbowl drawings, as I like to see it.)

If you happen to come across one of us happy Basecampers, be sure to ask for our card. They look like this.

Designing and illustrating the cards took a day. You can see how quickly other folks in the company chimed in to help me try new ideas throughout the day. The full-sized screen capture of the design discussion follows. Click-to-enlarge it to 100% if you’re on a desktop.