We started selling our handmade gadget cases a couple of years ago. We try and fit in our own projects around client work and the shop was one of them. At the start we had a simple setup: WordPress with the eshop plugin. As we out grew eshop, we began to develop our e-commerce strategy and thinking about the bigger picture.

This is by no means an exhausted list, it’s a summary of the services we’ve tried and our experiences of them.

Amazon (Pro Merchant Account)

Amazon approached us nearly a year ago now and said that they’d like us to sell our handmade phone and laptop cases on their site. We were really excited about this and promptly accepted! However, our experience selling our handmade products on Amazon was a mixed one.

Pros

• You have the potential to reach millions of people!
• Our handmade products were very different to the current gadget cases listed on Amazon. They are mainly made from silicone or neoprene and are *cough* a bit dull.
• Your contract with Amazon is renewed monthly, making it easy to leave at any time.
• Amazon are on hand to help answer any questions you have about listing products, and they are very prompt.

Cons

• Products are required to have a unique barcode (EAN) number. We looked at various sites when trying to decide where to buy our barcodes from, but whether these barcodes were being ‘legally’ sold was a bit of grey area. In the ended we decided to do it properly and register with GS1 (who Amazon also recommended). £204 got us 100,000 barcodes in our number bank (for one year). However, once you’ve purchased your barcodes, you need to renew these every year otherwise they will expire.
• There are vast amounts of gadget cases listed on Amazon and many are cheaply made.
• Sales and feedback reflect your listing position on Amazon so as a new seller it was quite difficult to stand out from other sellers and items.
• You have to pay a fee +VAT (£28.75) each month regardless of how much you sell.
• They require you to have a minimum of 30 products in order to launch your shop.
• It took us quite a while to list our products. They’ve created a very powerful system but it’s a bit of a beast to use.

We decided to close our Amazon seller account a few months ago due to disappointing sales. Their suggestion to this was to buy plastic screen protectors and list them alongside our products, which wasn’t really going to fix the problem.

This experience taught us a valuable lesson: know your target market! Amazon is all about stacking products high and selling them for the best price possible. toggle are the opposite, we create limited run products created with love and sell them to people who appreciate the time and effort that goes into handmade products.

Folksy

“Folksy is a place to buy handmade things, and for makers to sell their work and find supplies. Based in the UK, Folksy aims to reclaim craft and showcase talented makers and their work.”

Pros

• A very supportive and friendly community of crafters. Many sellers regularly showcase other sellers’ Folksy products in ‘Folksy Friday‘ blog posts.
• Low commission rate of 5% per sale.
• Low listing fee of 0.20 GBP per item.
• Folksy is smaller than sites like Etsy, so it’s easier to stand out.
• We’ve had quite a few customer orders for laptop and phone cases from Folksy customers.
• They are trying hard to promote the site with things like the ‘Folksy Festive Sampler‘.
• They’ve made quite a few updates to the system which is making it easier and quicker to list products.
• You can add stock levels to each product.

Cons

• It can be a bit of a ghost town at times – but I think this is in part down to how much you promote your Folksy shop.
• It costs 20p to list an item. Although this is a very low cost, it soon adds up if you are listing lots of items. If your items do not sell you’ve made a loss straight away.
• Listing products is not difficult, but there are ways this could be improved.
• The site design doesn’t look as ‘polished’ as some of the other third party sites.

Etsy

“Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice:Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade”.

Pros

• Etsy is always innovating with new site features.
• It has a vey active community: teams, virtual labs, forum and events.
• The website looks great and makes it easy for buyers to get sucked into a world of beautiful handmade goods for hours (guilty!).
• Etsy is branching out across Europe.
• A low commission rate of 3.5% per sale.
• Low listing fee of 20c.
• You can embed your Etsy listings onto your website as widgets.
• Listing products is very easy, especially with features such as shipping profiles.
• You can add stock levels to each product.

Cons

• Etsy is becoming a very big community of crafters (which is excellent), but due to the volume of listings it’s easy to get pushed deep into the site very quickly.
• Payment is not integrated into the checkout process – which means the buyer is not required to proceed through PayPal in order to complete their transaction. This has resulted in us having a couple of orders that were never paid for.
• It costs 20c to list an item. Although this isn’t much, it soon adds up if you are listing lots of items, and if your items do not sell you’ve made a loss straight away.

Notonthehighstreet.com (NOTHS)

“Everything you see or buy on notonthehighstreet.com comes direct from the small, creative British business that designs, makes or sources it. We simply bring these unique businesses together under one roof making it easy for you to browse and shop.”

Pros

• NOTHS are very active when it comes to promoting the website both online and offline.
• They have a fantastic product listing system, which they are always improving.
• They conduct seller surveys which are considered when improving areas of the site.
• Very good seller support for issues and technical queries.
• They provide sellers with style guidelines for the site. This results in listings looking professional and coherent.
• As a buyer, it’s very easy to find and browse products.
• Payment is integrated into the system, so buyers have to pay for goods for the order to be complete.

Cons

• Selling on NOTHS is by application only.
• If your application is successful, you have to pay a joining fee. This is a large initial investment, but it does give you ‘membership’ for life.
• NOTHS take quite a high commission of each sale +VAT.
• Advertising costs for the catalogue and gift guides are high. Unfortunately they do not provide many low cost advertising opportunities at this time.
• You cannot link to your own website on any material sent to the customer with their order. We have had to re-design our shop tags since selling with them because we used to include a link to the the toggle website.

toggle website

The toggle website is powered by WordPress. We use the Shopp plugin as the base to run our shop and manage our orders.

Pros

• It allows customers to buy our products directly from us rather than a third party site.
• We have full control over the shopping experience we provide our customers.
• No commission or listing costs.
• We have been able to fully brand and customise our shop.
• We are directly building our brand.
• The shop looks professional.
• We were able to plan for shop growth from the beginning.

Cons

• Creating our shop has been a larger cost in the short term (but will save us money in the long run).
• Bug fixing and updates are a big responsibility. When selling through sites like Folksy and NOTHS, this is done automatically for you.
• Large time investment.
• The checkout is controlled by PayPal which takes a cut of each shop sale.

Conclusion

Custom solutions

Custom solutions offer you great flexibility and can sit directly on your domain. They take longer to set up but in the long term you are building something unique to you and your products.

Third party sites & handmade marketplaces.

Selling on third party sites is a fantastic way of spreading the word about your company and it’s products. Selling on these types of sites can be a compromise (site design, layouts etc), but it offers you a great deal of exposure. Although we have our own online shop, we continue to sell on third party sites for this reason.

For us, the best solution has been to use a combination of our own site and third party sites.

Tips for selling your handmade products online

• Are there already a lot of people selling what you make on a particular marketplace? If so, think about your USP (unique selling point) and use this to decide whether it will be the most beneficial place for you to sell or not.
• The more sites you sell on, the longer listing products will take. This might sound very obvious but it’s something I didn’t appreciate when setting up shops in the beginning. Different sites will have different guidelines for listings – some have none at all. Look for ways to standardise your listings and photos.
• Take the best photos you can. Generally, products that get featured on other blogs and websites are those with good photography.
• Know your target audience and where they are likely to be shopping.
• If you’re thinking about creating your own online shop but don’t know where to start, try services like Folksy. From using their systems you’ll be able to decide what you do and don’t like.

We’d be very interested to hear about your experiences with any of these services or others you’ve tried. Feel free to leave us a comment! If there’s anything you’d like to ask us, get in touch.

It’s been a while since we’ve created any new stationery designs. Our last stationery products were made from photos we’d taken using our vintage cameras. We sold the last of these cards and postcards over Christmas and decided this range would be discontinued as we wanted to experiment with illustration instead.

A month or so ago we created some new shop tags:

We loved creating this hand drawn type and wanted to use the technique to create some illustrations. Our leather bird laptop cases have been selling really well so we’ve combined the motif from these cases with our new type design.

The wing area of the bird can be personalised with either a name, a short message such as ‘happy birthday’ or it can be left blank.

You can check out the card in our shop or contact us if you are interested in stocking this card in your own shop.

This project explored the use of story telling within our society and culture as a means of helping consumers to understand the background behind the products they were buying. So, as makers of handmade gadget cases, we were ideal candidates for the brief!

The outcome of the project was a piece of editorial design describing the maker, their products and the philosophy of their business.

We went to see our groups work on Friday – and were so pleased with what they made, we decided we would showcase the projects on our blog…

Emily Wright

Emily Wright Design »

Mark Walter

Mark Walter on Behance »

Katie Heward

Katie Heward on Behance »

Dan Annett

Dan Annett on Behance »

Ash Jordan

ashjordandesign.co.uk »

Manjing Yu

Manjing Yu on Behance »

Mobile requirements are popping up in most of our projects this year and over the last few months we have been preaching the benefits of responsive web design to our clients. The idea is that one site (with the help of CSS media queries) can serve a whole range of devices from handheld to desktop. It’s great. It saves time, future proofs your website and it’s a great approach to modern web design.

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also requires a different way of thinking. Rather than quarantining our content into disparate, device-specific experiences, we can use media queries to progressively enhance our work within different viewing contexts.
— Ethan Marcotte

All is good?

We have hit a problem with relying on CSS media queries alone. There are times when not all of the content, JavaScript or CSS on a page is relevant for a particular device and simply hiding the unwanted content with CSS is not ideal. Lets say you’re in the countryside with a limited data connection and your trying to find an address for you’re next meeting. We should not force you to download unnecessary content and load heavy JavaScript libraries that waste your time and your data allowance. mobble helps address this.

mobble

Those of you familiar with WordPress will be familiar with conditional functions. mobble is a collection of similar functions that allow you to test for a specific type of mobile or handheld device. We have wrapped these functions into a neat WordPress plugin but you will also be able to use these in other projects too.

The functions

The most useful four functions:

is_handheld(); // any handheld device (phone, tablet, Nintendo)
is_mobile(); // any type of mobile phone (iPhone, Android, Nokia etc)
is_tablet(); // any tablet device (currently iPad, Galaxy Tab)
is_ios(); // any Apple device (iPhone, iPad, iPod)

The full list (hopefully self explanatory):

is_iphone();
is_ipad();
is_ipod();
is_android();
is_blackberry();
is_opera_mobile();
is_palm();
is_symbian();
is_windows_mobile();
is_lg();
is_motorola();
is_nokia();
is_samsung();
is_samsung_galaxy_tab();
is_sony_ericsson();
is_nintendo();


Some examples

In this first example we are loading a specific stylesheet for Apple devices:

<?php
if (is_ios()) {
    wp_enqueue_style('ios', get_template_directory_uri() . '/ios.css');
}
?>

In this second example we hide the sidebar from all mobile/phone devices:

<?php
if (!is_mobile()) {
    get_sidebar();
}
?>

An added bonus

For those of you that run this as a WordPress plugin we have added a nice little feature that adds browser information to the body class of your theme. This allows you to use CSS to tweak the interface for certain devices. Look for the mobble settings within the WordPress admin interface, from here you can turn this feature on and off.

We will do our best to keep the plugin up to date with the latest devices that hit the market and if you have any ideas to make it better please let us know in the comments. The plugin is open source and released under the GNU GPLv2.

Download mobble from WordPress.org

We get a parcel in the post and the packaging goes into a box for reuse. We save the lot – bags, foam beans, tissue paper and bubble wrap. You can imagine how it starts to look around here at Christmas! You’re probably wondering why on earth we’re telling you this – well it’s because we have been thinking about how we package our shop products for shipping.

When we created the shop, we wanted to make sure that were responsible with the amount and type of waste we created. We use alot of upcycled materials and keep all our offcuts and scraps for other projects.

We also try and use as little packaging as possible for our actual products. Each case has a small handmade card tag attached with string and is wrapped in paper for protection – at the moment we are upcycling old maps from the 70′s. However, the one thing we’ve found ourselves continually needing to buy is jiffy bags. They aren’t the most environmentally friendly choice of packaging because plastic is glued to the paper, making them harder to separate for recycling. But

1. They protect goods in transit – the bubble wrap layer makes them resistant to water and protects the case from cuts and scrapes.
2. They can be reused. Reuse is always preferable to recycling.

When you buy something online, most of the time it arrives in a brand new jiffy bag, box or bag. People have come to expect it. You associate new goods with new packaging. But this got us thinking – why are we buying all these jiffy bags when we have a whole heap of used bags here already?

So we have decided that going forward, our products will be sent to our customers in used packaging (where possible). Although this may not look as nice, it will greatly reduce the amount of jiffy bags we need to buy, creating less waste when the product reaches it’s buyer. If everyone reused a jiffy bag at least once, think how much packaging waste we could all save!

We have created a label for our reused packaging to let people know why they are receiving their order in a less than perfect bag. And we hope that this will encourage reuse of packaging from toggle shop products,

“I know I know! I may be a bit tatty, but before I retire I’ve got plans to see the world! Preloved packaging, from toggle.”

You can see some of the photos from it’s creation here:

The label has been hand cut from lino and took a whopping 4 hours to cut out.

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”.

The Johnny Cash Project invites people from all over the world to choose a frame from the ‘Ain’t No Grave’ music video and submit their own interpretation of that image. These images are then edited together to create a new music video – a collective sequence of painted art. The aim of this project is to create a ‘living’ memorial to Johnny Cash.

As a Johnny Cash fan, I couldn’t wait to have a go, here are a few screen captures from the project:

You are presented with a simple image editor with a choice of brushes, brush size, opacity, reference frame opacity, colour (greyscale) and undo redo buttons.

Not sure how pleased Johnny Cash would be with this interpretation of his face (it’s a good excuse to make a few more)!

This is a fantastic amalgamation of digital and handmade. And whether you are a Cash fan or not, it’s a great opportunity to contribute to a global art project. The final videos are stunning…

Whilst perusing a brightly coloured website littered with animated GIFs I stumbled across a live recording of Bad Religion. It was the first MP3 I ever downloaded (American Jesus by Bad Religion) and it took me nearly a whole day to get it (I still have the file). A week or so later I had enough MP3s to fill half of a cassette tape. Within twelve months I owned my first MP3 player.

I’m not normally one to reminisce but the Internet felt good back then. It was completely open, democratic and innovative. This idealistic Internet is the one that I fell in love with. It felt like a step in the right direction and I like to think everyone else felt it too. I had arrived as a citizen of Cyberspace and I felt very welcome.

Fast forward to 2010 and things are starting to feel very different. Here are a few of my concerns:

Silencing of WikiLeaks

Have you heard about WikiLeaks? Of course you have! It is the website that governments of the World are currently trying to silence and yet over the last few days we have heard about nothing else. Whether or not you agree with the disclosure of the cable documents you have to be concerned at the techniques being used to bring down the site and the lack of support the site has received from the companies it relies on to operate. PayPal, Amazon and EveryDNS.net have so far surrendered to the pressure of hosting or being involved with delivering the content. For me the attempts to censor the site are more troublesome than the actual leaks.

It would be irresponsible to try and condense the news surrounding this site into a few paragraphs but the story is fascinating. John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has declared this as “The first serious infowar… The field of battle is WikiLeaks”. The outcome of which will likely shape the future of the Internet.

The good news is that so far Twitter has stood up to pressure to close the @WikiLeaks Twitter account and it helps secure the site as the true pulse of the planet. I hope they continue to remain impartial throughout. After all it’s not about sides, it’s about protecting the Internet as an open platform. Everyone has the chance to speak (in 140 characters or less).

Rise of Facebook

Talking of social networks. I hate Facebook (there I said it). Why? Because it’s everything the Internet should not be. A walled silo of data, locking its users and their content into the platform. A citizen of Facebook is not a citizen of cyberspace. Of course it’s not just Facebook that suffers from this problem, however it is the monopoly when it comes to social networks and is the easy target.

I constantly wonder why it has become such a sucessuful website  and what our widespread usage of the platform suggests. Perhaps we just do not care that much about our personal information?

The fall of LimeWire and 82 other domains

While most peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has earn’t a reputation for offending copyright law it is a very clever use of the web and has brought with it a massive amount of change. It has forced age old businesses to rethink their strategy and has given individuals a platform for global distribution and almost zero cost. There are some excellent stories surrounding the use of P2P. For example the release of Swedish film “Nasty Old People” that was made available on the The Pirate Bay under a Creative Commons licence.

LimeWire has been a consistent and fairly quiet player in the world of P2P software. On October 26, the US federal court issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to prevent “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of its software. As a result LimeWire has had to close both its legitimate business as well as disabling the software. The interesting thing is that all of the older versions of the software continue to work without a problem. If your a LimeWire fan then simply do not upgrade to the latest/broken version. This shows the inherent strength and resilience of P2P technology. While I have never used the service myself I am sad to see it close, it has been around for 10 years (since the days of Napster) and has attempted to legitimise the act of file sharing during that time.

It was also just a few days ago that the US Government managed to seize 82 domain names and pluck them from the Internet. This is a new tactic in the fight against copyright infringement and appears to be scarily effective. Some of the sites were no doubt breaking the law and deserved to be closed but as far as I have been able to tell the site owners had no prior warning or opportunity to defend their actions. It seems wrong that governments have the power to take any domain name they choose without a fair trial and it undermines freedom on the Web.

App(le) stores

This year has been about the App store. Popularised by Apple and iPhone it seems that every mobile platform now has an App store. We have been here before with Windows, Mac and Linux software. One platform came along and made it possible to serve content and to some extent applications to all of these different operating systems without having to program the same application three times.  It’s called the World Wide Web. Yet we find ourselves in the same situation with mobile phones. All of a sudden the money I spent on my iPhone games is thrown away the second I move to Android or Blackberry or Palm or {insert another mobile platform here}.

Which agencies are mostly responsible for pushing into the field of mobile apps? Internet agencies. If they truly understood the power of the Internet then they would have not moved from an open, flexible and free platform to one governed by app store approval processes and split revenues. As data connections get cheaper and mobile browsers become more powerful it makes sense to build one mobile website that serves a whole range of devices. Not just one.

Build it once. Build it on the Web – most native mobile apps require an Internet anyway. Sure they are great platforms with plenty of money to be made but we all end up paying in the long run.

And so…

It was about this time last year that I was drumming up support against the Digital Economy Bill (which looks like it may be reviewed soon). Perhaps this is when it all started? The problem is so many web professionals just don’t seem bothered by this stuff. Why should you care?

Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

Tim Berners-Lee, Long Live the Web – December 2010

We need to start innovating once more to protect against these new methods of online control. Pick up your laptops and begin work on a peer to peer hosting environment, one that responds to HTTP requests or ensures there is no weak link in the delivery of information (perhaps it is P2P DNS we need?). Trash your Facebook account and pitch in with the development of the Open Source Diaspora project. Rely less on one single company to deliver your Internet experience. Don’t get complacent and let’s not forget why we fell in love with this place all those years ago.

Toyota

I was given a Toyota DC30 sewing machine a couple of years back, after it had been sat unused for a few years. After a clean up and a bit of tinkering, it worked perfectly. The DC30 was a simple machine – 4 step button hole, 16 stitches and tension adjustment. I really loved using it but after a while, it started to struggle with a few layers of padding and PVC and so I started to think about a new machine.

Jones

Shortly after this I was lucky enough to be given another machine, a Jones VX-1000. This sewing machine was tough and perfectly happy to muscle through layers of padding and other material. Again, a simple machine – (only) 2 stitches, adjustable stitch width, adjustable stitch length and tension adjustment. The main short falls of this machine (for me) have been that it doesn’t cope with thinner materials very well (prone to chewing) and it doesn’t have a button hole stitch. I could create button holes by using the zig zag and straight stitches – but this was a bit of a kerfuffle and I wasn’t happy with the finished quality.

So, from using these machines, I knew a bit more about what I wanted:

• Four step button hole, or even better one step
• A machine that could handle a range of fabrics from cotton to denim etc
• Preferably non computerised – purely for the fact that it’s cheaper to repair and I can do a degree of servicing myself
• Variety of stitch styles
• Variable stitch width and length
• Drop in bobbin
• Applique stitch
• Free arm

In the end, I narrowed it down to four machines:

• Husqvarna Emerald 118
• Janome 2522LE
• Toyota STF39
• Silver 2021

Silver 2021

And I decided to buy the Silver 2021. This machine was recommended to me by Bedfont Sewing Machines who originally serviced my Toyota. I’d misplaced the piece of paper with the recommendation on it and found it again after I’d bought the 2021, so they made a good recommendation as it’s the machine I ended up buying. I chose the 2021 because it can cope with thick materials and has plenty of the features I was looking for. I’m a bit old fashioned in the sense that I was quite happy without all the computerised features and didn’t want many functions I wouldn’t use.

One thing I did have an issue with was the automatic/one step button hole. My first long edge (2) kept coming out as straight stitch rather than zigzag, I tried lots of different approaches but ended up with a big pile of useless button holes on scraps of cotton. I googled the problem and alot of people seem to have the same issue, especially on new machines. I called the company I bought the machine from and they recommended I did the following a) loosen the machine up (could be stiff as it’s new) b) check the zigzag stitch is functioning correctly:

1. Un-thread the machine
2. Pull down the buttonhole lever
3. Select zigzag stitch
4. Select full stitch width
5. Run the machine at full speed

So I put pedal to metal and it worked! If you are having issues with one step button holes on a new machine give this a try.

I am a bit sad to see my Toyota go, but I’ve whipped up a few cases on the 2021 and it works like a dream – you can see the results on the toggle shop.

Bunny Rabbit Alphabet

By Lucy Player on Folksy

“The entire alphabet made of rabbits! Drawing these caused me way too much amusement. A digital print from original pen drawings, printed on to white 210gsm A4 card.”

Alphabet Soup poster

By Something Wonderful Design on Folksy

“Hand-printed from individual linoblocks, this is a stunning poster on A3 sized artist’s cartridge paper. The Alphabet Soup poster range is strictly limited, and each one is slightly different and very special!”

Sliced Bread card

By Gingerbred on Folksy

“Handmade card using an illustration and design created my me… to tell someone they are the best thing since sliced bread!?”

Eco notebook 18

By Spare: eco on Folksy

“Handmade and hand-bound from rescued and reused paper, beautifully individual and unique.”

Bake Do And Blend

By Lovelittle on Folksy

“Hand pulled screen print with Bake do and Blend design unframed. Printed with water based inks on high quality 300gsm Snowdon cartridge paper.”

There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing… Eric Schmidt (Google CEO)

Image released under the Creative Commons by comedy_nose on Flickr.

For reference an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes (about 4 billion of the latest laptops). Every digital click creates a trail of information: analytics tracking, server logs, browsing history, search history, previous purchases and recommendations. Add this to the content we choose to share: photos, articles, blogs, emails, instant messages, texts, Facebook Likes, Tweets, Diggs, Stumbles etc etc and the result is a vast quantity of data being stored throughout the world, every second of every day.

By 2013 the quantity of information on the Internet will double roughly every 72 hours. Aaron Endre

This will inevitably lead us to a couple of quite serious problems. The first is how we choose, find or filter the content we consume and the second is the environmental impact of storing, transferring and keeping all this data.

Content Consumption

You have to wonder if  the solution to this will be generating less content or finding new ways to filter it. Google are in a good position with search but there are many situations where search does not make sense. For instance on Twitter where you follow people who interest you but you may not always be interested in everything being said. This is the same for RSS applications. I subscribe to a large number of blogs and more often than not I am only interested in a just few of the posts each day. I have to scan through 100′s of articles to find the ones that really interest me.

Largely this problem can be solved with smarter technology. Personalised search, bookmarks and social graphs can be used to generate some very powerful tools. Its more likely we will build these tools and continue to generate obscene amounts of content. But should we?

The Green Issue

We were recently asked to consider joining a list of green agencies on Re-nourish. While we would love to be listed, in light of the above, can we really be a green company? We have over 8 terrabytes of storage space in the toggle office (not all of its used). All of our data is backed up here and across the internet to distant corners of the globe. We tweet, we blog and we share photos. We have handfuls of accounts across different web services. Each of these services generate more data for both us and our clients. Our server gets backed up in three different places and each and every web site we host gets larger month after month; using more bandwidth, more storage and more electricity.

How can we start to improve this?

Website Performance

Last week we began a new phase of website performance testing. We are now keeping a closer eye on ping times, load times and uptime’s of our sites and server. On top of this we are investigating WordPress and website performance gains. We have managed to decrease the load time of this site by around 3 seconds for the homepage and we will continue to make improvements on this over the coming month. Improved website performance not only reduces the strain on bandwidth, storage and electricity, it also increases conversions, user satisfaction and search engine performance. It’s certainly a worthy endeavour.

Say Less

When you say less, you get noticed more. There are a couple of blogs that I subscribe to that only post a handful of articles each year. The strange thing is I nearly always read them from start to finish. When they do arrive in my RSS reader it’s a real treat. The quality of the content is far more important than the quantity.

There are many blogs (that I will not name) that are quite obviously writing pointless articles aimed at search engine performance and riding current trends. These articles are getting easier to spot and are appearing more frequently. At some point the value of the things we share will have to be put under scrutiny (a completely separate issue).

Account Control

How many different usernames and passwords do you have? Which services are they for and are they necessary? We have always kept a list of the accounts we have. The list is useful to remember the variations of our username (toggle, toggleuk, togglelabs etc). The list has become even more useful though as we are now going to start closing any account that has not been used for a year. This should help curb the amount digital waste coming from toggle HQ and stop it extending into infinity. In short; close your old accounts. You remember that MySpace profile and Friends Reunited account? Delete them!

So, I’m about to hit “publish” and I can’t help but feel a little more digitally plump from the impending avalanche that is about be sent your way… and it’s not like the delete key can save us now with its over forgiving, trash can, revision saving, are you sure? Nature.

Image released under the Creative Commons by superflexnet on Flickr.

Pixie was always going to be an open source project. Free to own, free to modify. When I first started putting the project together (around five years ago now) I had already committed to the idea. The Internet relies on free and open source software and Pixie had to be part of that. I believed in it, and for the most part I still do.

Without a doubt the project has been a success; on a personal level and for getting toggle off the ground. Pixie was the launch platform for our first year in business, it has been deployed by us on many websites and continues to work flawlessly. On top of that Pixie has been downloaded well over 25,000 times, translated into 18 languages and awarded second place in the Packt open source CMS awards (2009). Pixie has raised our profile and stood its ground against larger projects with more funding, more support and bigger communities.

Its not all good news though and after a few months of reflection at the start of the year we decided it was time to consider stopping the project. My passion for developing the software started to fade towards the end of last year which coincided with a very difficult time for us. Our finances, jobs and business were on a knife edge.

So at the start of April we listed Pixie for sale and so far we have been unsuccessful in finding a buyer. Pixie has not sold because it does not generate (easily measurable) revenue and potential buyers are faced with the challenge of monetising a project that requires time, development and support for the community. These are the same reasons it’s difficult for a young business like ours to invest time on it and when you look at the numbers it makes for a very interesting story:

Help & Support

There are 2824 messages in the forum – if we assume half of those are answers and half are questions that works out to be 1.9 questions per day for the lifespan of the project. Each reply has to be carefully considered and that adds up to a great deal of time. This does not include the personal emails that arrive in my inbox too. The real challenge is that for the project to grow it needs to be supported and realistically that support (at least at the start) needs to be free. This particular problem is one we hope to address with our latest labs project.

Code contributions

The number of downloads is fast approaching 30,000 – out of those people there are only three that I would class as core contributors. That is 0.01% of people giving back to the project and that is not good enough. There are lots of possibilities for why this is: perhaps I could have given the community better tools? maybe lots of people felt it was good enough already? I can only speculate as to why this might have happened but I wish the number was higher.

Financial contributions

In two years we have had three donations to the project (totalling £70). This leads me to the conclusion that people do not appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to run and develop such a project. We need to learn to value the things we do not pay for and/or lower our expectations. We have had some fairly insulting emails for taking our time when replying to support questions or because Pixie did not work as expected. Thankfully that has been a minority of people.

Advertising & Referrals

To try and generate a small and steady income we looked at both advertising and partnerships. None have worked out very well. Our first attempt was to use Google Adsense across the site. After a few months our balance had made it to $30 and when we hit that milestone Google shut our account. The money was gone and there is no appeal procedure to get it back. To this date I am unsure what happened. So we replaced those advert units with ones powered by buysellads.com. To date these adverts have generated us $20 and we are unable to claim this money as it does not hit a threshold amount. That money might never make it to our account.

We also formed a hosting partnership with a company called Arvixe. They pay $70 for each hosting referral we send to them and it started out well. Within a few weeks we had five registrations but we had to wait three months before being paid. As time went on those initial payments disappeared – apparently they cancelled their accounts before we could be paid the referral. Nearly 12 months on and we have only ever had $140 from Arvixe. Referrals no longer show up despite people in the forums claiming they clicked through from the Pixie site.

Last week I removed all advertising from the Pixie site. It is a real shame when open source projects have to turn to advertising to support themselves. I recently switched my laptop to Ubuntu and have been searching around for open source software. Take a look at gimpshop.com – the site is littered with adverts and you can tell by the language and layout that the developer is struggling. As a result the last release was released a very long time ago. I find it strange that we are happy to spend thousands of pounds on Adobe Creative Suite yet so reluctant to drop the developer of an alternative some beer money.

Content creators across the web face this same problem every single day and thankfully a new service has appeared that tries to address the issue. It’s called Flattr and I recommend grabbing an account. We have already created a Flattr button for Pixie (to test the service) and at the end of the month we will be getting a small income from it, likely to be fractions of Euro. But its a great start and beats having tacky adverts littered across the site. You can even Flattr this post… after all, it took weeks to write (I started writing back in March!).

What next?

Collectively we need to get better at collaborating on open source projects. We all have a part to play and we must learn to appreciate the hard work that goes into the projects we take for granted every single day.

Despite what it may read like we remain confident in open source. Open platforms will eventually win (see Google vs Apple) and the future we all want relies on this being the case. We have plans for some smaller projects that we are going to open source in future… actually most of our labs projects will either be open source or support open source projects.

With regards to Pixie I feel we have taken the project as far as we can. We are now trying to decide what the next steps should be. The great thing about open source is that a project can live on regardless of what happens. If you have any ideas we would love to hear them.

For those of you not familiar with Folksy, it’s a place to buy and sell handmade items. This is our first Folksy Friday post and contains our favourite products from talented crafters on Folksy.

Mega Large Owl and Friends Cushion

By Linziloop on Folksy

Love the illustration on this jumbo cushion.

“54cm square cushion featuring an owl and his friends spotty donkey, dog, owl, hedgehog, and a turtle riding a turtle. This quirky design is a one off in my shop at the moment, and I’m sure it won’t be around for long as I’m even finding it hard to part with!”

Patchy pockets cloth wallet

By Ellie’s Treasures on Folksy

Perfect for storing change and other knick knacks.

“Very pretty six pocket sturdy cloth wallet – the perfect answer to all those little bits and bobs that get lost in your handbag, the car or around the house.”

Fox iPod / Phone / Gadget Case

By Minifelts on Folksy

We love this cosy looking gadget case from Minifelts…

“Made from high quality brown felt and double layered for extra protection (inside layer is made from black felt). There is also a flap for extra safety that fastens using black velcro at the back.”

A Lovely Pear Felt Brooch

By Dizzy Izzy on Folksy

I’ve had my eye on this brooch for a while, now I just need an excuse to buy one!

“This brooch is cut out by hand, and hand stitched to make a cute brooch.”

Earlier in the year we decided to focus and dedicate more time towards the handmade aspects of our business: our websites are hand coded, we use handmade elements in our design work and enjoy using traditional techniques for creating imagery.

A couple of Christmas’ ago, I was given a book called ‘Type, The Secret History of Letters’ – a book about the history of letters from the 15th century to present day. Reading this book gave us a new appreciation for traditional typography and started the idea of owning a letterpress one day. So when we found a refurbished 6×4 Adana letterpress (1953) for a very good price, it sealed the deal.

The press is in very good condition and has a lovely fluid motion to it. When you pull the handle downwards, the ink rollers move up to the inking plate. When the handle reaches it lowest position, it makes a lovely ‘chink’ noise as a small lever under the plate rotates the ink plate using a set of teeth. This is what I love about analogue gadgets; it’s much easier to see all the parts and mechanisms that make them work.

After researching our press, we discovered that our Adana 6×4 was made in Twickenham, not far from the toggle office. The press was originally created as a hobby sized letterpress and cost £16.80 when it was made in 1953. The very first Adana machines created in 1922 only retailed for £2.25!

At the moment we only have the press and rollers so we need to buy alot of equipment including roller wheels, ink, paper, type and blocks. Reading that our press was classed as a ‘hobby press’ made me chuckle because it’s incredibly heavy and not something you can whip out of the cupboard when you feel like doing a bit of printing. However compared to the printing presses that filled entire rooms it is most definitely hobby sized.

We’re looking forward to getting stuck in and creating some lovely prints. No doubt we’ll make a few letterpress items for the toggle shop.

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.

Netbooks have become extremely popular over the last two years, the price and size are extremely appealing. Nearly every major PC manufacturer has got in on the netbook craze and plenty of other unexpected companies too. Nokia is one of those companies stepping outside of its comfort zone with the Booklet 3G.

I have always been partial to the idea of a netbook although I am not completely sure why. Over the last 12 months I have had a look at a few options (the HP Mini 110, the Compaq mini 311 and Dell Mini 10) but for the most part the build quality of the machines has been pretty poor. Plastic chassis and flimsy keyboards are a common feature.

The Good

Nokia seem to have the build quality wrapped up well. The Aluminium body feels extremely sturdy and while the keyboard is plastic, its feels strong and responsive. It is a stunningly well designed and attractive little gadget. Inside it packs the very standard Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor but despite this it seemed fast enough for most netbook related activities (web, video, music). Perhaps this is testament to beautiful things working better? Other highlights of the booklet 3G include the battery life (around 12 hours) and the built in 3G sim card slot – negating the need for a large 3G dongle.

The Bad

While size is one of the big attractions of netbooks it leads to many compromises. The screen resolution is too big (1280 x 720) for such a small screen and the keyboard feels cramped when typing. The screen is surrounded by a large black bezel which suggests the chassis could accommodate a larger screen and it would certainly benefit from it. The keyboard area also has space for larger keys which would be a big help. The other two negatives are the price (£650) which is twice the cost of similar specification machines and the operating system: Windows 7. Having used OSX for the past six years it seems like a step backwards with Windows 7. I would rather see and use a well thought out Linux distribution, perhaps Jolicloud?

Conclusion

Netbooks are a fairly strange concept if you think about it. As our mobiles get more powerful, do we need a device to bridge the gap between our (bigger) laptops/desktops and phones? After all the gap between our computers and phones is getting smaller all the time. My feeling is that I do not need a device that sits in this space, at least not at the moment. I am left wondering what are people using netbooks for and when?

If you would like to find our more about the Nokia Booklet 3G you can find the full specification on the Nokia site and we have also uploaded a few unboxing photos to Flickr. We would also like to say thanks to WOMWorld/Nokia and Carl for supplying the test unit. Keep an eye on the toggle shop for netbook cases arriving in the next few days.

I love taking photos on these cameras because of the element of unpredictability and amazing effects achieved without the use of Photoshop. The main characteristics of photos taken with these cameras are high colour saturation and high contrast styles that lack crispness and detail. So we were excited to discover two great apps that give us the best of both worlds: the beauty of a lo-fi photograph with the convenience of digital files.

Lo-mob (1.19GBP)

Snap

You have two options here – choose a photo from your camera roll or take a new photo. The app has a tendency to crash, so I’d recommend taking your photo first and then importing it into Lo-mob. If you’re working ‘live’ from within Lo-mob and the app crashes, you’ve lost your photo (it’s not stored in your camera roll).

Customise

Lo-mob has a huge collection of camera effects which include colour slide, 6×6 with various tints, 30′s, 60′s, desaturated, instant film and wide format. Once you’ve taken your photo, you can choose from a huge selection of filters, which are displayed as thumbnails. The thumbnails are quite small, but you can select one to see a larger scale image preview. You can’t flick through the other filter previews at this point, instead you have to go back to the filters list and waiting for the next full sized preview to load can take a few seconds.

Once you’ve chosen your filter you can alter it even further by removing the background (slide/instant film borders), keeping the background and removing the filter, converting to black and white and adding and removing vignetting.

Use

You can customise the output photo sizes for Mail, Facebook, Twitter and Picasa (found in your iPhone settings), ranging from 240x320px up to over 1200px. I have my photos for Twitter saved at 600×800 so they upload quickly and saves set to maximum for a high picture quality I can use elsewhere. We’ve been using the DropBox app to make transferring these photos easier.

Pros

• Lots of filters to choose from
• Polished interface
• You have the ability to further customise your picture by adding and removing effects and borders

Cons

• Can be very slow to create a preview of photo effects
• App has a tendency to crash
• You have to go back to the main preview list to view other filters

Camerabag (1.19GBP, available for Mac and PC)

Snap

The Camerabag interface is very simple. Once the app has loaded, you have a holding area where the photo will be displayed with photo, email, save and camera roll icons. Like Lo-mob, you can take photos with your camera or choose from saved photos.

Customise

Once you’ve chosen your photo, Camerabag loads it straight into a large filter preview. This app has far fewer filters than Lo-mob but this gives it a big advantage in terms of speed and stability – I’ve had very few crashes using this app. You can easily flick through all of the available filters by swiping left and right or use the arrow underneath the filter name – which brings up a list of effects.

Use

There are 6 Camerabag filters I regularly use – Helga, Colourcross, Lolo, Instant, Silver and 1974. To make things easier, I can turn off filters I don’t use in Settings. I really like this feature, because it helps make my use of the app more efficient.

The output size of the photos is customisable and ranges from 600px to over 1200px.

Pros

• Speedy
• Lightweight
• Has a fisheye filter
• Easy to flick between filter previews

Cons

• Limited number of effects

Overall, I love both apps for different reasons. If I could pick the best features from two, I’d choose the filter library and quirky interface from Lo-mob, but the speed and filter settings from Camerabag. If you want something simple to use with subtle filters than Camerabag will do everything you need, but if you’re after dramatic effects and lots of them, then Lo-mob is the app for you.

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.

iPad

When we first heard about the iPad we were disappointed. Our biggest complaint is that the device runs the same operating system as the iPhone, this instantly limits the software that can be run on it. We were hoping that the iPad would be a laptop replacement, allowing applications like Photoshop to be controlled with touch. A touch controlled tablet could have massive implications on the way we design with computers.

On refection its quite easy to see that this device is not aimed at creative computer folk. It is a consumer device that offers a platform for consumption: music, film, games, applications, TV and books from iTunes and the new book store. While this is a limitation for us, it does open the device to a massive target audience. It is the first computing device I can actually see my less technical grandparents using. With the 3G version they would not have to take out a broadband contract and we could finally send them emails. Touch is a massive part of this change as it negates the need to learn how to operate a mouse and the app store provides the right kind of software if they wanted more from the device. This will make the iPad a hugely popular gadget.

A few people have asked us: “Will the iPad mean we need a new website?”. From the looks of the Keynote and demonstrations of the iPad, the built in browser (Safari) will be loading the desktop version of a website (rather than the mobile version). So those of us with HTML based websites should need to make very few changes (if any). Like on the iPhone, Apple have decided not to include the Adobe Flash plugin. This means that anyone with a Flash based website may need to consider some changes to their site. At the very least you should be serving a HTML version of your site to those visitors without Flash enabled. We will talk a bit more about the future of Flash in a moment.

While we may not be rushing out to buy the iPad (although I am sure we could be tempted), we will be making a new range of cases for it. We are waiting to have some of the dimensions confirmed to make sure our cases offer the correct level of protection and still allow access to the dock connector and necessary ports. We will be launching the cases in our popular fabrics (vege leather, polka dot corduroy and upcycled garments), so keep an eye on our twitter feed for updates.

Nokia Booklet 3G

The Nokia Booklet 3G is not a new device (it was announced in August 2009), however we were kindly leant a test unit two weeks ago. It is one of the few netbooks around that go head to head with the iPad: offering similar hardware, design and functionality. We will be writing a full review of Booklet 3G once we have thoroughly tested it.

The rise in popularity of netbooks is also changing our perception of design for the web. A few years ago it was assumed that our computer screens would get larger, with bigger resolutions. This has not been the case. Smaller devices have meant that screen resolutions have got both bigger and smaller at the same time. Could we begin to see websites move from pixels to vectors as a result? Having our designs scale to the size of the screen that requests it could be very handy. The HTML5 specification (that we talked about last year) also hints towards this change with support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). This technology is also competition for vulnerable looking Flash plugin.

Flash vs HTML5 vs Google vs Apple vs Adobe

The primary application for Flash is online video, online games and heavily interactive websites. The Flash plugin has been with us for many years and as a result it is installed on around 99% of all Internet connected computers. Flash will not be disappearing overnight but its future looks more uncertain than it ever has before.

Our biggest problem with Flash has always been that its not an open web standard. To build Flash websites you need to run propitiatory Adobe software and plugins. This goes against the nature of the web. Flash is also notoriously difficult to work with in terms of accessibility and SEO and is believed to be the cause of many browser and computer crashes (for example: this Flash site will crash your browser). The one advantage of Flash has always been its cross platform compatibility. Flash renders the same across all computers, phones and operating systems that support it.

YouTube and Vimeo both recently announced availability of their video libraries in HTML5 (no Flash plugin required). The HTML5 versions of the sites only work in Apple’s Safari browser and Google’s Chrome browser. Both Google and Apple are working together on the same browser technology and right now those browsers are capable of delivering a Flash like experience using nothing but HTML and CSS. Add this to Apple’s reluctance to support Flash on the iPad and iPhone and a technology battle is emerging.

The situation gets more complex though when you realise that Mozilla (with Firefox) are refusing to support the same video format as Apple and Google. Why? Because once again we are staring down the barrel of a closed technology that requires costly licence fees to implement. Very similar problems to those we have with Flash. To top it all off Microsoft have said nothing and the latest version of their browser (Internet Explorer 8) barely supports HTML5 at all.

A Conclusion?

There will never be one. Technology is an ever changing landscape with competing companies and ideas pulling in many different directions. This fast pace is what makes our industry so interesting and I have to say that we enjoy keeping up with the latest developments and gadgets. We are constantly learning and researching to make sure the products and services we design are current, open, stable and the right fit for our clients. What new gadgets are you looking forward to this year?

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…