For posterity here is what our site looked like before:

The new website is the result of four months (intermittent) work. It began in the new year with a plan to improve our copy writing across the site. It then slowly evolved into a larger scale project to upgrade the shop and add a new section too.

General:

We took this opportunity to improve the typography across the site. The type is now larger and as a result much easier on the eyes. We now also use a sixteen column grid for most of our pages which gives us greater flexibility for layouts. We have continued to use watercolour illustrations on the less content heavy areas of the site and left the journal relatively unchanged (for now).

The message:

Without words the web is meaningless. The two previous versions of our site have been focused largely on design but this time we wanted to focus on our message. All of our design and code is produced here at toggle HQ, by hand and we wanted to make this more apparent to visitors. Before starting to redesign the site we had already written the content which we collaborated on via Google Docs. Our new homepage loads one of six random messages that provide you with a snippet of toggle wisdom. We will be adding more wisdom in future – as we get wiser.

The shop:

The first version of the toggle shop was very much an experiment that has turned out to be very successful. The old shop software was perfect for our trickle of orders at the start but over time we have started to require something more feature rich. Our new shop allows us to have much greater control over the e-commerce experience we provide. We can now offer discount vouchers, create invoices and update customers as their order advances through our office. The shop also provides us with summary of sales and statistics making it much easier to keep up an eye on how we’re doing.

If you follow us on twitter we will be sharing our first discount code very soon!

The labs:

Last month we announced Speclative and Postiory – our first two labs projects. We are always working on internal projects here at toggle and we wanted a place to showcase these ideas. The labs was born.

We hope you like the changes (there have been many more than just those mentioned above) and look forward to your feedback.

What are Pository and Speclative?

Pository and Speclative are browser bookmarklets that provide you with instant feedback on an article/website you are about to read. A bookmarklet is like a normal browser bookmark but instead of taking you to the bookmarked page it interacts with and changes the current page using JavaScript.

Pository decides how negative a page is and rates it accordingly. If the page fails then Pository recommends you read something a little happier. Speclative works in a similar way but looks for speculative language instead. Perhaps the title of this post makes sense now?

Where did the idea come from?

Last year we spent a great deal of time commuting. On a dreary three hour commute your eyes get drawn to the newspaper headlines on the many free newspapers. If you have ever been on a train at rush hour you will appreciate how easy it is to get sucked into articles being read by the person opposite. We were commuting whilst swine flu was a hot topic and the headlines read: Swine flu ‘could kill up to 120m’ and similar. It was clear to see that most of the articles were based on speculation and for the most part were written to spread misery and negativity. Could we do something about it?

A few months into our commute we started to collect the newspapers discarded on the trains at the end of each day and look for patterns in language. Whilst we could not filter the stories in the real world we decided to take our battle to online where it is easier to analyse the data on a page. The idea was born.

How do they work?

As soon as you click on one of the bookmarkets the URL of the current page your viewing is sent to our web server. In a fraction of a second we retrieve the web page as plain text (this only works on publicly accessible pages). For Pository we have complied a list of positive (happy) and negative (sad) words and weighted them accordingly. We then count the occurrences of those words and from that we can score the page. Speclative works in a similar way except the keyword lists are different – based on fact and speculation. Once we have a score we can make a recommendation as to how speculative or negative the article is.

The microsites are built using HTML5 and on the server side we are using PHP5 with the excellent PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser library. The bookmarklets make use of jQuery and will auto update once you have them installed. The bookmarklets have been tested to work on all modern browsers except for Internet Explorer (support for IE will be available soon).

What comes next?

For now we are very interested in both the data we collect and the feedback we receive. Over time we hope to improve the scoring and weighting to reduce the number of “unknown” results.

The data collected from the two bookmarklets will allow us to make generalisations about various news sources. Which websites provide happier news articles? Which websites write articles based on fact? Which websites write articles based on speculation? Once we have enough users of the service we will be able to answer these questions in real-time and eventually provide recommendations of other sites to visit: “Is the current page you’re reading too sad? Try this website that has written about a similar article in a positive way.”

Once the databases have filled up we hope to provide interactive, real-time visualisations of the results. These will inform our research into Internet filtering. As the Internet swells with content the ability to quickly determine the usefulness of an article will be very important.

Speclative and Pository were made to be good fun to use and they were certainly enjoyable to build. More details of how to install, use and provide feedback on the bookmarklets can be found at postitory.co.uk and speclative.co.uk.

Simplicity

2009 was an extremely turbulent time for us. We moved offices twice, and then back to where we started. We took on freelancers and paid work experience students. We talked about expansion, discussed diversifying, discussed focusing on one business area, launched our shop, a new website and the laundry service. All of these were experiments to establish a route forwards. A route that would hopefully afford us some financial security and allow us to continue doing the work we love. It is safe to say we moved away from simplicity in a the hope it would take us somewhere new. It didn’t – but at the same time some of these experiments were essential. We now know what we want, what works (the shop has been a huge success) and what doesn’t (huge overheads and staff). They are important lessons to learn.

Design

2009 was a good year for design. The shop allowed us to experiment with design a great deal. We produce our own packaging and labels as well as getting to make the actual products. We also experimented with print making, book binding and illustration for various projects throughout the year. We would like to do more handmade work – I think our own site illustrations prove that it can be very effective both online and off.

Open Source

Our Open Source efforts continued with Pixie and as a result we were rewarded with a runner up prize for “the most promising Open Source CMS“. That is a massive achievement and puts our little CMS along side some of the greats (WordPress, Drupal etc). Things were not all rosy for Pixie though. In July we received a legal threat from Tech4Learning with regards to a Pixie trademark in the USA. The letter was a “cease and desist” so we decided to ignore it. Our reasons for this are simple; If Tech4Learning would have approached us with a civilised inquiry then a discussion could have taken place about the Pixie name. Instead they took the route of a scared business. One that is afraid of competition. If anyone from Tech4Learning is reading this – we would still be open to a discussion about it.

This year we need to look at ways to monetise our Open Source work – while we love to help, it has proved to be extremely taxing on our time. A decision needs to be made about the future of the Pixie project and we a currently experimenting with ideas. We will keep you posted.

2010

So here we stand at the dawn of 2010 (the year of the flying car! – ha) and its time to make new plans. We want to talk a leaf out of Carl’s (Fellow Creative) book and tip our hat towards transparency and honesty for the coming years. Being open about ideas, plans and money is a good thing. If you know where we stand you can decide if you want to stand with us (or otherwise).

Right now we are in a period of flux as we make changes to the business – both in terms of company structure and how we work. You will notice that Mike is no longer with us as he moves on to start a new business. But no fear, we are not going anywhere, we just want to make sure that whatever we decide to do in 2010 is the right choice for us and our clients. We are in the process of working out our plans and will post back the outcome. Decisions, decisions…

But what do you do when you find the copy that you spent weeks writing and rewriting for your new company website has just been lifted by another design company?

Bizarrely, this is exactly what happened to us a couple of weeks ago.

An email from an online friend suggested we check out a company called Relik Creative in Columbus, Ohio, because the copy seemed a bit, well, similar…

It wasn’t similar, it was identical. The main body of copy from our newly launched toggle website had been lifted wholesale. The copy we must have re-written at least a hundred times, the copy we had debated and polished for hours was working hard for another design company.

Obviously, we were not happy campers. So we calmed down a bit and contacted Relik Creative’s owner, Alex Boorman, and politely asked him “WTF?”

To be fair, he immediately took the copy down from his site (but then again, he was pretty much bang to rights…) Alex said that he’d hired a virtual assistant to write it and his lawyers would be taking it up with them immediately. He said he was as angry as we were and at the time we had no reason not to believe him…

But the weeks have rolled by and Alex won’t give us the Virtual Assistant’s name, or the details of his lawyers who insist that he can’t pass it on.

It also seems strange that a company which offers a copy-writing service would hire a VA to bang out what most independent creatives would consider to be the single most important piece of copy they’ll ever write.

And the trouble with the internet is that while our copy is gone from the Relik Creative site, happy clients who thought it was great have pasted it on their site as a tribute to Relik’s creative genius.

Alex Boorman has stopped returning our emails, claiming he’s far too busy with clients to deal with this issue.

We think we’ve been really patient with Alex and have done all we can to try and make sense of it. If you’re a US newspaper or TV journalist who’s beat includes Columbus, Ohio, you might want to pick up the story. We’d be happy to pass on all the emails and screenshots.

Alex, we gave you the benefit of the doubt for as long as we could, but we think you’re guilty. Guilty of online theft and – maybe worst of all – guilty of trying to use the “a big boy did it and ran away” defence in the 21st Century…

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™.

The incident got us thinking about ways in which we can better communicate service issues to our clients. Before Tuesday we had been relying on an small status message on the hosting page of our website which was accompanied by an RSS feed. While this worked for announcing planned server maintenance it was not much use in emergencies. Last October our main server suffered a hard disk failure on both disks, the server was taken offline immediately and repaired within two hours. During those two hours our site was not reachable and we could not update the service message to inform people of the outage. We had considered moving the updates to an email based system, however during the Google outage email was not a viable option.

Today I am pleased to announce a new way in which we will be delivering our service notifications: Twitter. Using Twitter we can deliver the status updates in a number of ways and as the system lives away from our core technology it should be online when our site is not. Here are the options for following the updates:

1. You can subscribe via RSS.
2. You can subscribe via email.
3. You can follow the account on your Twitter.
4. You can check the support section on our website.
5. You can visit our Twitter page directly.

Twitter offers a simple, concise messaging system for delivering service updates and while it has a reputation for being slightly flaky, it has now overcome the majority of its growing pains.

Update: In response to Tuesdays downtime Google have now launched their own service status website. Once an RSS feed is available for this we will pipe it into our support Twitter account.

We have opened a toggle shop on Etsy (a community of people who make things by hand). At present, we have iPhone and mobile phone cases for sale, but plan to launch more handmade items in the future.

Here is a sample from our first batch:

Providing this phase goes well we will be looking at expanding both the shop and the products we sell into the year. We look forward to welcoming our first customers!

Our first toggle project was to build this very web site and as we completed it the enquiries for work began, as the year moved on our work load grew and unfortunately that led to fewer blog posts. New years resolution #1: Write more.

Our first year has been a success, we have had ups and downs but on the whole we go into 2009 on a positive note. We have projects to start, pitches to attend and a few 2008 projects to finish. The most important thing to come of this year has been the knowledge we have acquired about running a business and in particular how to work with our clients. They are all different, with different wants and expectations… in short: one size does not fit all.

Rather than write a post that looks back on the year that has passed I want to focus on looking ahead, what will be important to toggle in 2009?

Simplicity

I have always been a fan of simple: Less is more and more is often unnecessary. Having just read “The Laws of Simplicity” by John Maeda I am convinced that businesses and consumers need to start focusing on simple. Its no secret that the world has hit a tiny bit of economic difficulty and while the media will have you believe that this is a bad thing I can personally see a number of benefits to it. With less money it becomes more important to streamline and simplify. This means cutting out the unnecessary and focusing on simpler solutions that are easy to use and implement. For example we recently stopped our Basecamp subscription in favour of using email and Remember the Milk, this not only saved money but was easier for our clients (who are not all technically minded) to use.

We are also in the process of switching our business banking, its not an easy thing to do once a company is in motion but once we have done it our banking setup will become much simpler to manage: two bank cards becomes one, one online account becomes many and a number of our bank charges will disappear.

Simplicity is hopelessly subtle, and many of its defining characteristics are implicit… Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. – John Maeda

Design

We built three CMS systems (Pixie, a toggle CMS and a property management system) and delivered numerous technical specification documents in 2008. It would seem that most clients are after “features” and that leads to conversations on development, not design. While we cannot get away from technology it is necessary to focus on the people that use it and not the technology itself. Design will solve problems that technology creates.

We aim to spend more of our time researching target markets, usability testing and researching our clients’ competitors. Letting design lead the development process will result in great experiences and better brands/websites. With current economic challenges it will be an attention to design to makes your product, service, brand or website stand out against those around you.

As part of this focus towards design, we will be heading to the Future of web design conference in April. 2009 is all about design…

Open Source

The idealism of the Internet manifests itself in Open Source. Open source proves that people from all over the planet can come together to make something greater than what is possible alone. I find Open Source to be inspiring and fascinating at the same time. On May 1st 2008 we launched Pixie as our first Open Source project, it has been downloaded over 8500 times and is in use all over the world. The people who use it are free to take our work and improve upon it and put back into the project anything they feel is missing. Pixie has improved over the course of the year and as a result everyone has benefited.

The WordPress team have proven that Open Source can be extremely successful and it is one the projects we watch closely with eager eyes. The new WordPress interface for version 2.7 has been thoroughly researched, tested and community driven. For the first time I feel I could give a copy of WordPress to a client and be confident in them using it and with that in mind we will be developing our first WordPress plug-ins in 2009. Beyond WordPress we would love to see how design can play a major part in the future of other Open Source projects, more designers should be giving time to projects in the hope that we can create greater software, that is simpler and easy to use.

The Internet is driven by people who donate time to projects such as PHP, MySQL and jQuery. Its time that everyone plays a part in giving back to the projects we use daily. If you feel the need to donate money in 2009 I would recommend you send a few pounds to a project you cannot do without.

We are already running two Linux servers and over the course of the year we will start testing both design and development applications that are Open Source. By 2010 I have a secret desire to be using nothing but open technology (web applications with at least an API or considerations for data portability and Open Source software)… is this possible? I intend to find out.

Thanks

So its 364 days until 2010 and I’m pretty sure we should all be wearing space suits and driving flying cars by then, we certainly have a lot of work to do! We are hoping to grow toggle beyond our comfort zone this year: A new office? New staff?… New clients! and of course continuing to work with those who have supported us so far. Bring on 2009!

Naming

One of the main routes we explored for the naming of this site was Latin. The reason for this was that it gave us something a bit more abstract to work with. We had decided to create an invented name (examples: Tesco, Frijj,
Hoover, iPod) in order to avoid words often associated with sites of this type (green, natural, body mind spirit etc). We found a three key Latin words:

• Pondera: meaning balance
• Terra: meaning Earth and land
• Animo: meaning nature

We started to cut these words up and splice them together. The name anderra was created by merging ‘pondera’ (balance) and ‘terra’ (Earth & land).

Logo

After we had created the name, the next step was the logo.

We had done masses of brain storming and sketching for the anderra logo, but felt we weren’t quite there yet. I was having a shower one
weekend, I picked up a body bar to use and noticed some suds that had been left on and dried. The pattern these suds formed made me think of anderra…so I took a photo.

We took the photo into illustrator and started looking at the organic shapes left by the suds.

Although the image was of soap suds, we felt the organic shapes were a good route for a number of reasons: The Earth use to made up of a super continent called Pangea. Pangea started to break and separated to create the oceans continents as we know them now. The shapes are also organic forms that feel very natural – there is no rigid ‘man made’ grid to which all the shapes much align. Much of the focus on natural body care is on the ingredients, and we felt these organic shapes also resembled molecues – the separate parts making something greater than itself.

We developed the logo as much as possible in black and white because we wanted to create a strong logo regardless of the colours or effects applied. We work on the thinking that if it looks good in plain black, it’ll look even better with colour applied.

Although the idea originated from soap suds, the final application of the mark to the logo suggests natural and organic.

The final solution

Then we added the polish! We chose blue and brown – colours of land, sea and sky.

You can see more of the anderra project in our portfolio or visit the site.

I think it is very easy to become over saturated. I read design magazines, I subsribe to design feeds, our office is full of books, we have posters on the walls and I collect lots of things that inspire me. I feel that looking for inspiration in these places can sometimes be part of the problem. You are bombarded with nice typography, great layouts, colour schemes and fantastic ideas. This gets your creative juices flowing and you start to think about all the little elements you want to add to your final solution. But no matter how hard you try to shoe horn them all in, they just don’t fit.

Talking

Sitting silently at our mac with our tunnel vision hats on not suprisingly doesn’t do much good. When we get a new brief, we’ll talk about the project, our ideas and usually come up with ideas we wouldn’t have thought of if we’d just sat in silence. Sometimes I can be talking about something I am having difficulty with and from doing that I can end up answering my questions I didn’t think I had the answer to.

Doing something else

…even if it’s just answering emails. We often find having a short break and doing something else for a while gives us a fresh perspective on what we are doing.

We have been doing some branding for a natural body care site we will be launching very soon. We had done plenty of brain storming, sketched, looked in plenty of books but didn’t feel like we had quite arrived at our solution. At the weekend when I was in the shower that I noticed the way some some soap suds formed on a bar of soap. Seeing this then gave me some ideas and we went and created the final brand.

Eating

toggle loves eating. If we get stuck, we will grab some food – usually Cadburys buttons from the local shop :) Taking time out to feed our brains seems to work wonders for producing ideas.

Walking

We are lucky enough to have the River Thames at the back of the office. Not only a great place to eat lunch but also a great place to go for some ‘thinking space’.

Sketching

We think sketchbooks are a great dumping ground for ideas. I think it gives you a different kind of freedom than you get from the computer because it’s a quick fire round of ideas. By looking at these ideas in their most basic form, you get a better idea of whether it is going to work or not. I think jumping into Photoshop too early can lead to more focus being placed on colours and effects rather than the actual idea.

Moodboards

Moodboards are great guides for a brief becuase they stop you going too far off from where you need to be. This goes back to what I said earlier about becoming saturdated with ideas. It can be quite easy to get carried away and lose sight of what is really appropriate; moodboards are a nice visual reminder of where you need to be.

Having a process

Processes are probably one of the most important aspects in design and they don’t have to limit your creativity. Having a process means you have all of the key elements you need in place. For example, when we design websites, we create tone of voice boards, site maps, work out what type of content will be going on the site – video, plain text, images etc. Once we have this information we start to create wireframes. All of these steps ensure we have really thought about the funcationality of the site. After we have got this right we move onto the design, colours schemes, imagery and typography. Working in this way means we don’t leave anything out and we have a site that works the way it needs to as well as looking great.

What are your tips for creative block?

We felt it was like putting a designer into the office of every client, a way to improve communication and bring them closer to the design process. Eight months later and we have decided to change the way we work… Basecamp no longer rocks our socks.

I think our biggest problem with Basecamp has been getting clients to accept it into their workflow. The truth is that nobody wants to sign in to yet another website to see a visual or make comment on it. Basecamp will send out a notification that a new file has been added to the project and that notification is delivered via email. What’s wrong with that? Well it would have been easier to simply send an email with the visual attached in the first place. Email is something everyone understands, its integrated into our lives and the way we work. Making use of it is not only easier for us, but for our clients to0. The more I think about email the more I feel the modern web needs to make MORE use of it, take a look at Posterous (they understand completely).

Having learned the lesson that email works much better for our clients we decided to keep using Basecamp for ourselves. The main sections of Basecamp we used frequently were the to-do lists, writeboards and occasionally the time tracking. By far the most important to us were the to-do lists. Both Gemma and myself are big fans of creating to-dos, nothing feels better than checking off an item from the list, you can feel the progress rush every time you do it. The thing is with Basecamp your to-dos are all over the place, each project has its own to-do list (which makes sense on first look) but in reality all we wanted to know is: “What needs to be done today?”. Navigating back and forth between projects to check the various to-do lists is slow progress in Basecamp (why is it so slow to load a page?) and it simply was not working for us. We also did not have a project for “everything else”, a place where we could set non-project related to-do notes such as “ring the tax man”. So we created a nice generically named project called “General” and set up a to-do area that looked a little like this:

It worked out very well for us, suddenly the time we spent clicking around Basecamp fell dramatically and my internal productivity monkey was smiling again.

Over time our usage of Basecamp began to fall, the writeboards were not as feature rich as Google docs (or as convenient) and the time tracking kept being forgotten. We found the best way to manage our time is with Google calendars and its built in reminders. The only thing we could not replace was the to-do lists until I decided to investigate Remember the Milk and found that it now integrates with Gmail:

We now have all our to-do lists right where we need them, they are shared between us and can be added to very easily via Gmail, Email, mobile phone, Google calendar and even Twitter. So the time has come to say goodbye to Basecamp, our new setup is simpler, fresher and most importantly saves us time.

I guess you could say its similar to WordPress, except Pixie builds complete websites not just blogs. We have been working on Pixie for quite some time and have always planned to open source the software and today I am pleased to say we have a schedule for its release. So when can you get your hands on it?

Beta testing – 14th April to 25th April:

Those of you who have signed up to the Pixie mailing list will have chance to beta test the software before the official release. The mailing list sign up will close on the 14th April.

Pixie release day – 29th April:

Pixie will launch. As part of the Pixie launch we will be producing 400 CDs that we aim to give away at this years extremely geeky Internet World exhibition at Earls Court, London (its free!). We will also be posting out a number of CDs to people who have helped support the project with code they have written.

One of things we are most proud of with Pixie is its ease of use which is largely due to the interface we have designed. To wet your appetite for the launch we have uploaded some screenshots of the application to Flickr. We are really excited about this release and look forward to your feedback.

The name

When we started thinking about our company name, we had pages and pages of brainstorming and ideas. Eventually we decided on the name ‘toggle’ for several reasons:

1. A toggle is something that is simple and works perfectly.
2. A toggle is defined as something that “Allows a user to switch back and forth between two modes”. Originally there were two of us with two specialisms that we switch between.
3. A toggle holds two items together.
4. In computing terms to toggle is “To turn something on or off; make something, such as a command or toolbar button, active or inactive”.

Some close runners up for names included: sumbit, ro:nine (which turned out to mean something rather rude in French!), and display none.

Logo development

This image is a small sample from our sketches. We thought about everything we possibly could: from switches, to binary, threads, features of a toggles including holes and curved edges etc. From this we were able to draw up a short list of the ideas we felt worked best.

It was around this point ‘togle’ became ‘toggle’. Mike pointed out that if someone was to Google search our company after hearing it’s name, most people would use the spelling with two g’s: meaning that we wouldn’t be found. It is also much easier than saying ‘toggle with one g’ everytime we tell someone the name of our company.

Finalising the logo

Finding the P22 Johnston Underground typeface was a key point in creating our logo: it is a curvy, ‘friendly’ and distinctive font that we felt represented our company values.

The P22 has a vast number of uses on the London Underground including station signage, tube maps, name plates and posters. There were two main characteristics that attracted us to this typeface. The first being that the uppercase O is a perfect circle – very much like the thread holes on a toggle. The descenders on the lowercase g’s linked together nicely reinforcing the idea of a toggle holding two items together. Above all we are a British company and liked the fact that we are using a typeface that has so much history in Britain including:

Johnston’s former student Eric Gill also worked on the development of the typeface, and the design was later to influence his Gill Sans typeface, produced 1928-1932 (Source: Wikipedia).

We took a trip to the London Transport Museum to look at the typeface and it’s uses in more detail. You can see the photos in our brand set on our Flickr account.