We wanted to kick off the journal by giving you a tour of our studio. We felt it was really important to create a good atmosphere to work in... after all we are spending 10 hours a day here. We divided our workspace up into a number of sections which I will run you through below, it is amazing what you can fit in an 3.3m (11ft) by 6.5m (21ft) space.
The Office
Both Gemma and I spend most of our time in the "office". The shot below is of Gemma's desk, she uses a 20" iMac as her computer and the small disk you can just see to the left of it takes a daily back up of our server. The backups run at lunch... the reason? It forces us to take a break... well at least that is the plan. The creature speakers are used for the jukebox which is run off iTunes and SlimServer.
Onto my setup. I run a 13" black Macbook and hook it up to a Dell 20" screen. On my desk I also have a huge all in one printer/scanner/fax/spaceship and a Mac Mini (currently used to run office type things and to do cross browser testing... we love you IE). Hiding somewhere behind all the junk and cables is also my iPod touch... a fantastic bit of kit.
The Library
At toggle we love books, they are great for inspiration and ,of course, learning. We have an ever growing collection of books that we keep in our library. Each cube is dedicated to a specific topic. Working from top left to bottom right we have: web, mystery black box, branding & packaging, a whole heap of good packaging design, another mystery cube... full of design inspiration, a general selection of design books, typography and in the last cube; books about street art and pixel art.
The Lounge
The lounge takes up the second half of our studio space, it houses plenty of toys and entertainment to keep us busy during breaks and its also serves as a good space to chat to our clients (and kick their ass at halo 3). The Samsung LCD is hooked up to a Mac Mini (for viewing sites, presentations etc), a mega drive (with mega CD!) and a brand new xbox 360 that Gemma was given for her birthday just a few days ago. I also have to mention Mischief... seen here on the windowsill. Mischief could be considered to be the CEO of toggle... he makes sure everything ticks over smoothly. A typical Mischief day involves, eating, sleeping, sleeping, eating and wondering around. To the top right of the picture you can just about catch our ever expanding camera collection.
That just about concludes our tour of the studio. We are still not completely finished with getting our space exactly as we would like it. We need more posters and pictures for the walls and we are also going to try and squeeze in an extra desk. We have uploaded full size versions of these pics to Flickr and covered them in notes so feel free to have a nose round.
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