Are there any design companies out there using Basecamp for managing print projects like catalogs, brochures, etc.?

My experience is that Writeboards are useless for these kind of jobs. No copywriter will ever use them and it seems like we are stuck with the chaos of Word.doc files. Managing texts with external copywriters for a large project is something truly painful.

What is your experience?

We have found basecamp helpful for print projects to coordinate deadlines and tasks for copy, design, print, delivery etc. We do not use the Writeboards instead of word docs.

Our experience is that clients/writers don’t trust something that they don’t have on their own computer. Believe me, we’ve tried. If the export function was able to spit out a .doc file as well as a .txt file they may feel more comfortable with it but I doubt it.

What would be very cool is a Writeboard/Wiki, where you could create a hierarchical navigation that strings multiple boards together. This would be very useful in managing all of the communication texts/copy that a client uses across their marketing.

As it stands, I use Writeboards to write proposals, strategy drafts, copy concepts, production specs and have even trialled them as a way to deliver a cost proposal due to the permanence of versions and comments.

I have also found that they are a great way of dumping notes into a project. Using a Message post for documenting notes was creating more clutter than necessary.

I agree with the issue of stringing different texts together. Even 37signals are surely not writing their entire new book in one Writeboard. Long texts are always broken down to smaller parts and a writer will never write in a web form.

What if Basecamp could parse any .txt, .doc, and other, when they are uploaded via a message, comment or the files tab and offer a way to link them together, make them readable and eventually editable/commentable. I don’t know…

Maybe this is a detour which helps:
You can link to google docs copying this in your writeboard

Has anyone made this work with Google spreadsheets without making them fully public?

I’m using whiteboards, and I get clients to use it to for print work.
I don’t think a parser is needed. Its just a matter of explaining the benefit and iterating to your clients to use it.

Using word docs are so pase

wegschaffel,

woa, that works quite nicely. i changed the width to 700 to fit better.