Image released under the Creative Commons by opensourceway on Flickr.

In January we were still deciding whether or not to continue with toggle. Toggle Design LTD was in the process of being closed as Mike had just left to start a communications company with his wife. We had a choice to make and we stuck with toggle. We are so glad we did.

We registered our new company in February (Toggle Labs LTD) and we have not looked back since. This year toggle has allowed us to make steps towards our ideal creative lifestyle. We have managed to buy our own place, make it our home (and office) and continue experimenting with our own projects. We cannot measure our success this year in terms of money – truth be told we did not make a great deal in 2010. We are now beginning to ask ourselves some difficult questions about where toggle will take us in the coming years.

Where’s the work?

We worked with fewer companies on longer projects during the course of 2010 which has been far more rewarding. Developing long term relationships with clients is a better way of working for us. The majority of our work was brought to us via other agencies which has resulted in less work for our own portfolio. This highlights an interesting issue; other agencies can see the quality and craft in our work but we are not communicating this properly to potential new clients. This is something we hope to address in 2011.

Pixie

It has been a turbulent and slow year for Pixie. After careful consideration we decided to sell the project a few months ago. The sale has just been completed and we are now going to use the time saved to focus on new projects. We were hoping one of those projects would be BoffinBase but this has been delayed due to its size and our work load. We also have smaller projects boiling in the labs which will likely be launched first.

Shop

2010 has been the best year for shop sales to date. We are hoping to do some data analysis on this once we reach our year end in February. Amazon contacted us in September and asked us to sell our products on their .co.uk website. We were very excited about this opportunity and of course accepted. Our Amazon store was only open for a short time though due to disappointing sales. We quickly realised Amazon is not the place for limited edition, handmade items. It has been a valuable lesson in understanding our target market and what they are truly looking for. This year we will continue to sell on just a small handful of online shops (toggle, Folksy and notonthehighstreet.com). We also want to bring the focus back to our upcycled and limited editions items.

2011

One of the fun parts of running a business is choosing in which direction to take it. This year is all about focus, direction and delivering a specialist service. We have a handful of aims for the next twelve months including:

• To specialise and carve a name for ourselves locally here in Farnham
• Deliver environmentally sound hosting for us and our clients
• To write much more and re-design the journal to accommodate new content
• Find a small and cheap (hopefully shared) office space in Farnham
• To no longer pitch or write lengthly unpaid proposals
• To communicate the science of design
• To improve the toggle shopping experience
• To make the time for research
• To make sense of the bonkers world around us using graphic design
• Releasing a number of projects we are currently pondering

Thanks for taking the time to catch up with our progress and we look forward to collaborating* with you in the near future.

*Collaborating is interchangeable with “drink beer”.

Last week was WorldView Impact’s 2 year anniversary and to celebrate we had a presentation and some drinks at the space. As part of this event, toggle bought some rubber trees in Sri Lanka. Each tree cost £15 – which is enough to cover the cost of planting and maintaining the tree for 35 years!

And why did we buy rubber trees you might be asking?

Worldview are working towards creating sustainable livelihoods for the poor with green business and at the same time, mitigating climate change.

One of their projects is a non-emission rubber tree plantation (powered by renewable energy) in Sri Lanka, which is where the trees we purchased will be planted.

Aims of the project:

• Provide good working conditions
• Give ownership shares to workers
• To provide communities with basic health and housing standards
• Create knowledge that can be shared with local communities
• Ease pressure on remaining rainforests
• Reduce carbon

To learn more about the project or buy some rubber trees, visit Worldview Impact »

Due to our office move and new site launch we didn’t get around to making any Open Source recommendations last month. To make up for it we will squeeze in two this month.

So far our recommendations have been desktop focused and primarily for the Mac (we are all Mac users at toggle). The Open Source movement extends way beyond desktop software and the Open Source business model is being adopted in some very unexpected places. Open Source cola, Open Source hardware and more recently an Open Source car.

A shift is occurring in the way we use technology and store our data, the shift is driven by the web and is moving the software we use online. The huge advantage to this is that our data follows us to any device we happen to be using. With this in mind we felt it was time to start looking at some of the best Open Source web applications.

OpenGoo

The sales pitch:

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organisation to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents.

In short, OpenGoo is a strong alternative to Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office on the desktop. What really impresses us with OpenGoo is the amount of features available in the application. OpenGoo allows you to manage:

• Text documents
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

From the looks of it they have more features on the way too. The application is the long lost cousin of ActiveCollab (a now commercial project) that we used to make use of in the early days of toggle. Essentially it is a mashup of many different Open Source projects rolled into one neat package.

We don’t make use of OpenGoo at toggle (yet) – we would need to have mobile access before jumping on board. OpenGoo could also be improved with cleaner interface, especially if our clients are going to be collaborating on documents with us. Playing with the demo we were really impressed and we will certainly be keeping a close eye on the projects future developments.

Pope Street, SE1

Pope Street is five minutes walk from Tower Bridge on the south side of the River Thames. Its a quiet street (except for the recent road works) and within a short walk we have some great places to grab lunch. We are still discovering new luncheonettes each day, if you know the area we would love to hear your food suggestions.

Worldview Space

The office is situated in an old London brick warehouse. Worldview Space is on the third floor and is a collaborative space inhabited by a whole range of businesses. One end of the space dedicated to team toggle. The blue paint used across the building pretty much matches the toggle deep blue which is a nice coincidence.

We also have access to a tiny roof terrace, unfortunately the buildings around are a little higher than ours which restricts the view. With a step ladder you might just be able to get a glimpse of Tower Bridge and the Thames.

toggle

Last Friday we took delivery of a laser cut perspex toggle logo to hang on the back wall. This is the largest our logo has ever been and its great to see the intricacies of the typeface when it is blown up this big. The logo sits proudly above our desks.

We have four (and a half) desks to fill and a wall of storage cubes that are currently filled with lots of design inspiration and books.

If you would like to see more pictures we have uploaded a whole bunch to Flickr.

After weeks of quietly beavering away behind the scenes, we have a new website, a new office and are pleased to announce a new way of working – the toggle Design Laundry Service™

Office

Weve moved the toggle-plex down-river from its original site near Staines to just south of Tower Bridge. Its a lovely old London brick warehouse, tucked away down a side lane. It even has a tiny roof terrace for the one or two days of summer we may have!

This is a quick peek of our new office – well give you the full Cooks tour later in the week.

Website

The biggest change for our new website is that we have moved to WordPress. This doesn’t mean we are abandoning Pixie, we just wanted to try something new. As soon as we have a couple of minutes, well write a separate post all about the intricacies of the new site. For now, here are some top-lines on our favorite new features…

Shop

By popular demand weve finally integrated our handmade craft skills into the business and launched a shop. Were currently selling iphone cases and gorgeous postcard packs – but keep checking back because we are planning to add lots of other toggle branded goodies in the near future.

Going mobile

We also felt it was time to build a proper mobile friendly version of our site – and so we did! Visiting from a mobile device will automatically serve you a simplified (but still beautiful) version of our website. We’ve tried and tested it and were happy, but would be very interested to hear any feedback you may have – good or bad…

toggle design laundry service ™

When we launched toggle we wanted to set up a different sort of operation. For a while now we’ve all felt quite deeply that to keep our standards high (and our clients happy) our business practise needs be sustainable – in the way we run it as well as environmentally. So after many late nights thinking and talking it through, we’ve changed the way we work – and this new way of working is called the toggle design laundry service™.