A new trend for storing our data is emerging. Its known as Cloud computing. With the Cloud, our data is stored in highly efficient data centres that allow us to access our data from any internet connected device. Some services you may use that are built on this technology are:

• Google Mail & Google Documents
• Spotify
• Dropbox
• MobileMe
• Amazon.co.uk

Cloud computing has for the most part been seen as a greener way to serve and store data. It is all about efficiency. With a data centres built for one purpose we can achieve higher levels of energy efficiency and improved performance. The Cloud also benefits from scalability – a reason why it has become so popular among web start-ups.

On the face of it this all sounds very positive but I cannot help feel we are making the same mistakes that we have made in the past. Lets compare Cloud computing to Monocropping. With Monocropping we produce one single crop in abundance, that’s our data centre. We then ship that crop from the fields, to a distribution centre and from there to the supermarket. That is the internet. We then head to the supermarket and bring it home, that’s our ISP and home computer. So what is wrong with that? Surely this process is at the core of the internet?

The problem is that its completely inefficient. Lets pick on Spotify. Rather than have a song stored locally on my computer I have to stream that song to me wherever I go. The bandwidth and computing power required to do that for every single song I own would soon add up. Rather than the data travelling from the hard drive of my machine to the speakers, it has to travel half way across the planet. Any efficiency gain made at the data centre is instantly lost with the constant shipment of 0’s and 1’s to and from the cloud to my machines. Multiply this by every internet user and I cannot help feel the cloud (at least for some applications) is a step in the wrong direction.

All is not lost though. To improve efficiency of the Spotify example above we could all delete our digital music. This would instantly free up a huge amount of computing power and storage space. If this save of computing power could be put to good use (rather than end up as e-waste) we might just be onto something. Essentially we would have one library of digital music that the entire planet accesses on demand. I quite like that idea.

The problem is, we love our data. We are married to it. We make backups of backups and get extremely upset when it gets deleted. Cheap technology allows us to hoard and save anything we wish – no matter how pointless or redundant. On this computer I have files that are over five years old. I never look at them and yet I am compelled to keep hold of them (and back them up).

These questions need to be considered before we rush ahead at the rate technology carries us. Before every major technology shift we must ask if our climate and environment can sustain it. My CD’s are dusty, my cassette tapes are in the bin and in the end – its just music (to a fat cats ears).

I’m sitting at my desk looking at a magazine spread full of graphs. All these graphs follow a trend of low to high – ie the line keeps moving upwards. Think about life, it’s full of climbing graphs:

• Life expectancy – people are living longer, diagnosis and treatment of disease has improved
• Temperature – warmer temperatures should lead to more vitamin D!
• Wealth – we’re all getting richer which means we have the money available to consume more – holidays, food, property, clothing, cars, gadgets, fuel
• Population – we find strength in numbers
• Profits – more sales, more money, more staff, more offices, more investment, bigger bonuses, higher salary

If everything’s on the up, this can only be a good thing, right?

The problem with this trend is that’s just not sustainable. What goes up must come down. By striving to be always on the up, we are setting ourselves up for an inevitable down. There will be a point where this line is going to start falling again.

Take population growth as an example. In the early stages of humans ‘arriving’ on earth, the best way to ensure survival was in numbers. In the early stages, humans were just a tiny spec on the planet. We dug wells, harvested small areas of vegetation, channeled rivers, dug mines and used the resources around us to build shelter. The more we reproduced, the more resources we needed to sustain ourselves. We started to turn meadows into fields to grow food. We chopped down areas of forest and mined raw materials to build homes. Over time, fields have been concreted over to build an airports, housing and cities. And he we sit at the crest of the peak!

If we continue at our current rate of consumption, we are going to run out of land suitable for farming, land for building houses and vegetation to soak up carbon dioxide. But the problem is we can’t put anymore ‘in’ and as a result we can’t get anymore ‘out’.

So what should sustainability look like?

A straight line.

Why not a circle?

A circle in theory is the perfect image of sustainability. But, a circle assumes we can start again from the beginning – when we draw a circle, we are connecting one point to another, the end to the beginning. A straight line has a beginning but has the capacity to continue forever. In order for the line to stay straight, we must put in what we take out – and this is truly sustainable.

Continuing our thoughts on population, we must find a way to control the rate at which people are born. Without such measures, our planet will not have enough resources to sustain us all.

Whilst browsing through a recent copy of Adbusters (July/August 2009) in our local magazine shop, it fell open on a single page article entitled “thinking the unthinkable”. The article, written by Tim Jackson sets the tone for our Blog Action Day posts:

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2010.

This extraordinary ramping up of the global economy has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology we depend on for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crisis aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our well-being.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People loose their jobs and sometime their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less that $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems we depend on for survival. It has failed spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil; the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices; the degradation of forests, lakes and soils; conflicts over land use, water quality and fishing rights; and the momentous challenge of stabilizing concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere. And we face these tasks with an economy that is fundamentally broken, in desperate need of renewal…

A message this clear needs little summary. Solving these issues must become a global priority.

You will need:

• Lino handle and assorted cutters
• Lino
• Block printing water colour. If you want a waterproof ink, look for block printing ink
• Rubber ink roller
• 2 sheets of acetate
• Paper
• Tracing paper
• Pencil
• Washing up liquid
• Mixing stick

Step 1: Sketch out and trace your design

Begin by sketching out your design. Once you have done this, put your design over a lightbox (a window is a good low cost alternative) and create a reverse trace on tracing paper – a reverse trace will ensure your design is not back to front when transferred onto your lino.

Step 2: Transfer trace onto lino

Place your tracing paper onto your block of lino – pencilled side down. On the back of the tracing paper, use a pencil and draw/scribble over the lines on the other side to transfer outline onto the lino.

Step 3: Cut out your design

You are now ready for the fun part! Remember that any part you cut away will not have ink on it. Use your lino handle and cutter attachment to remove strips of lino. A trick for making the lino easier to cut is to heat it up gently with a hair dryer – this is especially useful for intricate areas.

You do not need to ‘dig’ the lino off the surface. Instead try and run the tool almost horizontally and remove the lino in strips.

I cannot stress enough here to watch your fingers! It’s very easy to slip when cutting out the lino and the ends of the cutter are v-shaped and quite sharp. It’s tempting to put your fingers close to where you are cutting (a bit like when you draw), but try to avoid doing this. As I’m typing this, I have 2 painful fingers from creating the featured print!

Step 4: Prepare your ink

For this stage you will need 2 sheets of acetate (or similar smooth surface). On one sheet put a blob of block printing ink and a small blob of washing up liquid. Mix the washing up and liquid and ink together – the washing up liquid is optional, but helps to prevent the ink from drying too quickly on the roller.

Once you have mixed your ink, transfer a small amount onto your second sheet of acetate. For the example shown (A4 print) I used about a 10p sized blob. Use the roller to smooth out the ink, rolling up and down and then sideways so that the ink evenly distributes across the acetate.

When the ink is ready, it will sound like a ‘whisper’. If it sounds ’sticky’ then you know you have either got too much ink or you need to keep rolling it until it’s smooth.

Step 5: Ink it up!

Now your ink is prepared, you are ready to apply it to your lino. Roll the ink on and then place your piece of lino face down onto the paper.

If you have a printing press then you can roll it through that. If not, then just apply some pressure to the print or give it a good rub with your hand. Then you can peel back your paper and admire your handy work.

Step 6: Clearing up

It’s best not to let the ink dry on your roller. If this happens it can clog which will give you uneven ink distribution. Wash rollers under luke warm water and allow to dry. When you have finished with your lino, give it a wipe with a damp cloth, making sure to remove all wet ink and leave to dry.

Once again we need your help. Voting has started and we are up against some great competition, the final five are:

• ImpressCMS
• Manhali
• Pixie
• Pligg
• Redaxscript

Public votes will be combined with ratings from a panel of Judges with winners announced on November 9. Packt is also giving away an 8GB iPod Touch to three lucky winners chosen randomly from the voting stage. Vote for Pixie »

You will need:

• Cutting mat
• Craft knife
• Glue (PVA and or paste)
• Glue brush
• Needle
• Strong thread
• Thick brown paper for spine
• Scrim/mull (thick muslin) for spine
• Paper for inner pages
• Paper for end papers
• Board (thick card or mount board) for the covers
• Paper of fabric to cover board

Step 1: create your sections

Select paper for your pages. If necessary trim to the correct format – so if you want a square page, you will need to use double the final width and fold in half or for an A5 book, fold A4 in half. Generally 4 sheets (creates 8 pages) work well for each section. Keep creating your sections until you are happy with the thickness of your book.

Step 2: line up sections

Once you’ve created your sections, put them on top of each other and make sure they all line up.

Step 3: measure out your holes to sew the pages together

Once you have done this, take a pencil and make a mark (up all sections) 15mm from the left side and 15mm from the right side.

Then, make 4 equal lines between these marks. This will bring your total number of marks to 6. So for an A5 book (A4 folded in half to make each section), you would have your 15mm measurement from the left edge – put your ruler on this 15mm mark and create a mark at 3.6cm, 7.2cm, 10.8cm and 14.4 cm. Then you will have reached your 15mm from the right mark.

Step 4: create the holes

Once you have created all the marks for the holes for each section, you will need to turn these into holes. Take each section and push a needle through each pencil mark.

Step 5: sew the pages together

• Hold your first section like an upside down v – with the fold facing towards you
• Pass the needle down into the first hole of one section
• Pass the needle up through the next hole
• Pass the needle down through the next hole
• Repeat along length of section

When you reach the end of the first section, your needle should have come from underneath the section and be ready to pass down into the first hole of the next section.

Now you will be joining your next section:

Repeat the same process above, but this time, hook your thread across through the previous loop (see diagram below) and continue until you have completed the section. This makes sure the pages are securely held together.

To tighten your sewing, pull your thread sideways, never up as this can cause the holes to rip. Continue sewing all the pages together and tie a knot when you reach the end.

Step 6: glue the spine

Make sure sections are all lined up together. Put your sewn book under a pile of heavy books to make sure that the sections do not move when you glue them. Apply a thin layer of glue to the spine and press down to make sure you squeeze out excess air. Once this has dried, you can trim pages will a guillotine to even them up if needed.

Put the book back under books to keep all the sections level. Apply another layer of glue and put on a piece of scrim/null. This will add strength to the spine.

Once that has dried, glue on a piece of thick brown paper and gently rub with your fingers to ensure it has adhered correctly. Leave to dry.

Step 7: create the outer cover

Once the glue has dried you should have something that resembles a book – all your pages will be in place and there should be no loose leaves.

• Measure the width, height and depth of your book
• First mark out the front and back cover on your mount board: take the width and height measurement and add 5mm (for front cover) to the top, left and bottom and 5mm (for back cover) to top, right and bottom sides.
• Measure the width of your book’s spine, adding 5mm to the top and bottom measurements
• Cut out of mount board and layout on your chosen paper – leave a space that is the width of your board between the front and back covers – without this gap you will not be able to close your book
• Apply glue directly onto boards or the cover material of your book. Apply glue from the centre out and leave to dry
• Once dry, leave about an inch excess cover material all the way round and cut out
• Then fold and glue this inch cover over onto the board (what will be the inside) and leave to dry

Step 8: gluing your end papers

This step is the most fiddly part of making the book.

• Your end papers will need to the double the width of one page of your book – so if you are creating an A5 book, the paper used for your end papers will need to be A4
• Fold your end paper in half
• Apply paste to one side of your end paper – we usually start with the side that will not be glued to the board cover
• Once you have done this, apply glue to the other side (the side that will be attached to the cover) and close the book
• This is always a bit daunting as you think it’s not going to work but it does!
• Put the book back under your books (never apply pressure to the spine) and leave to dry overnight

Done! Now you can admire your book!

Take a peek at our hand sewn books in the toggle shop »

iphone cases

With the Autumn weather rolling in, don’t let your phone feel the cold :) People wear jumpers and so should phones! We’ll be making more of these cases in the future with lots of different button styles.

A few months back I bought some vintage scarves from a shop in Falmouth, Cornwall. I’d kept them in my fabric stash for a while because I couldn’t decide what I wanted to use them for – until now! The scarves are quite small so we’ll only be producing a very small run of the upcycled vintage scarf cases.

Since launching the toggle shop we’ve had great feedback on our girly iphone cases – so we’ve started expanding our range of products for geek girls.

Christmas cards

Yes, we’ve started thinking about Christmas already! Our first few runs of Christmas cards are back from the printers and ready for sale. All Christmas cards come with brown recycled paper envelopes.

Lomo Christmas cards

Injecting colour into Christmas

Christmas light cards

Christmas tree lights, candles and decorative lights.

Reindeer jumper Christmas cards

Based on old fashioned Christmas jumpers

Hand bound books

We’ve been flexing our book binding muscles and making notebooks from our paper stockpile. Each book is hand sewn and made with eco friendly, waterbased glue.

Hand sewn recycled paper notebook

Hand sewn bird print notebook

These notebooks are perfect for using as: scrapbooks, journals, photo albums and travel journals.

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

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

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

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

Aims of the project:

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

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

The ubiquitous iPod has pushed iTunes into the hands of millions, after all if you want to sync media with the iPod or iPhone you don’t have a great deal of choice. My main gripe with iTunes is the fact it tries to control everything. By default it will duplicate every music file you own and attempt to sort them in a way it feels appropriate. Being a designer the neatness of my files matters to me. A lot.

It’s not just that though, iTunes wants to rip my CDs as M4A files – not ideal when all my other tracks are in MP3. I like MP3 files as they play on anything. I feel like every time I use iTunes I have to play with the settings to get it to behave how I expect it to. Finally, what’s with all those arrows and trays that try to sell me tracks I already own?

To be honest I miss Winamp. Back when I was a PC, Winamp was my player of choice. It let me manage my files and watched my perfectly sorted music folders for when I changed or added music. It played every file I threw at it and collapsed into a tiny little music bar that stayed out the way. The skins and the plugins rocked too.

But today I want to talk about Songbird, a player that’s been around for some time but recently caught my attention again. Songbird describes itself as “The Open Music Player” and looks like this:

The unique feature of Songbird is that it’s built around Mozilla technology, essentially it’s Firefox customised for music. That means lots of plugins and themes, but most importantly it can be used as a browser too. One of my favourite music sites is Grooveshark. Grooveshark allows you to play virtually any track instantly, for free via your browser. But what about Spotify? (I hear you cry). Well Spotify is OK, but I don’t like audio adverts and I don’t like having yet another piece of software to listen to music. Spotify is also partly owned by the companies that got it wrong the first time round.

With Songbird I can manage all my local MP3 files and enjoy all those tracks I find online too. I have also installed some great plugins that allow you to manage the songs on your iPod, broadcast messages to Twitter and display lyrics for the current song. The one plugin that would make this setup even better would be integration with Amazon’s MP3 store. As a substitute it does integrate with the 7digital Music Store, however I have yet to try it. I would be interested to hear any feedback on the service.

With Sondbird, Grooveshark and the Amazon MP3 store I feel like the issues facing the music industry have become a problem of the past. Rock on.

If you have found Pixie a useful tool we would really appreciate a vote:

Your votes (for this first stage) must be made by 10th September 2009. Simply click the banner above and fill out the form at the bottom of the site. Thanks :)

After searching for the perfect wool and make some prototypes, the cases are ready. Each case is hand knitted from soft, lightweight merino wool. They are made for the iPhone but will hold most similar sized or smaller phones.

We’ve introduced a custom order option for this style, giving you endless colour combinations!

To order: add the custom knitted striped iphone case to your trolley and then specify a body and stripe colour in the additional notes when you enter your address etc. If you want a colour that’s not in the wool swatches, drop us an email and we’ll see if we can get hold of it for you.

Custom cases are knitted to order and therefore take 7 days.

Take me to the toggle shop! »

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…

With the launch of the toggle design laundry™ service a few months ago we have found we are now generating more reoccuring invoices than ever before. The dates and amounts of these invoices vary from client to client and on top of that we have quite a few hosting invoices to get out each month too. Our plan was to find an Open Source invoicing application that would generate recurring invoices, let us know if any are overdue and allow us to use our own invoice numbers (were picky about these things). It also made sense for this application to be online so we could access it from anywhere and give a login to our accountant if they needed it.

Siwapp

In terms of design this is the most promising of the three systems we tested. The layout is clear and the feature set is spot on for what we needed (although custom invoice numbers were not quite right). One thing that we really liked about it was the running total on the dashboard (seen above). The huge let down at this stage is the installation procedure. The application requires the Symfony framework to run and as a result needs plenty of command line attention and the correct web hosting environment to get it running. Siwapp shows real potential and is worth keeping an eye on.

Simple Invoices

The latest 2009 builds of Simple Invoices feel much better designed that the previous versions but unfortunately the application is still in beta. As a result it feels incomplete and the generated invoices look unprofessional. As a design agency we have always take great care over the presentation of our invoices and it was one of the main reasons we decided not to use Simple Invoices. Once again though it shows the potential to become an excellent tool.

phpBMS

phpBMS is a full featured business management tool featuring calenders, to-do lists, detailed user permissions, sales, products and invoicing. The interface is a little clunky but it feels together and stable. If you are just starting out your business then you may want to consider giving phpBMS a try – for us though all the extra features were overkill.

The winner is?

Having tried out a handful of options we decided to go with a product called The Invoice Machine. In this instance the Open Source options were not polished enough – we felt we needed a product we could trust and rely upon. So far The Invoice Machine has been excellent and the API means we can tie it into other systems if required. It also offers a full data export if we decide to go Open Source in the future.

Between projects, we’ve been busy planning some new ranges for the toggle shop, so I thought I’d share what we’ve been up to.

In the near future we’ll be introducing some knitted goods. Our iphone cases have received great feedback, so we thought this would be a good place to start. The new range of knitted cases are based on stripey vintage sports socks.

Image source: Richard and Gill on Flickr.

Sneak peaks

Each case is hand knitted with Debbie Bliss merino wool. This wool isn’t the itchy sort your Grandma use to knit jumpers with – its very soft, keeps its shape, lightweight and can be machine washed at 30 degrees. For our crafty readers: this wool also knits up with a lovely even tension.

In the near future, we are hoping to offer a ‘custom’ knit option for these cases. The idea being that you’ll be able to choose your body and stripe colour.

We’ll let you know when the cases are ready for sale!

Earlier this month the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced that the future of XHTML looked uncertain, with that news came a deluge of posts discussing the potential of the new HTML5 standard. While its great that the web now has a clearer path to progress along, it is important to remember that the HTML5 specification is still in draft (and is not expected to be completed until 2021). Some people have taken the death of XHTML as bad news, however nobody can disagree that the two competing standards (XHTML and HTML) were beginning to stall progression of the web. With the transition to HTML5 comes a new lease of life and some exciting tools to make use of too.

For us web developers its time to start exploring HTML5, to see what it can do today and what it might be able to do tomorrow (once EVERY web browser gets up to speed). Gradual deployment of new HTML5 features over the next few years, that iteratively improve our websites and applications is the way to do it. Here’s what we’ve found out:

HTML5 is go

It’s beyond the scope of the toggle blog to get into ALL the code you need to get started with HTML5, we can however point you in the right direction and discuss the pitfalls we hit during our research. The best starting article we have come across is Smashing Magazine’s HTML5 and The Future of the Web. Its a great primer and pointed us towards an excellent HTML5 example for starting your first document:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" >
<title>HTML 5 complete</title>
<!--[if IE]>
   <script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<style>
   article,aside,dialog,figure,footer,header,
   hgroup,menu,nav,section { display: block; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello World</p>
</body>
</html>

Lets take a quick walk through. First off, is the new doctype at the top of the page. Its short and sweet compared to those of the past. Next up is the meta tags, on our test page we ran into a few problems with some of our standard meta tags. Passing the code through the HTML5 validator (work in progress) threw a few errors. It turns out that:

The http-equiv attribute is only allowed for the one case of setting the character encoding in HTML5…
via Google

Which means that certain meta tags:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb">

Are no longer supported. This is no huge problem (most of the other meta tags seemed to pass without issue) but well worth knowing. The rest of the code is fairly standard for any web document, however the extra JavaScript include and CSS are very important for getting the new structural HTML5 tags to behave in Internet Explorer. The structural tags will form a large part of your new HTML5 documents and are summarised here. Using a JavaScript hack to get HTML5 to work in all browsers in not ideal and a part of me thinks we should continue to use <div> elements, with classes relevant to the structural tags of HTML5. It looks like we are not the only people to think this way.

For now that is as far as you can safely take HTML5 across all browsers, however there are tonnes of new features we can look forward to.

Looking forward

Here are some of our favourite features of HTML5, for a full list of what’s planned you may wish to keep one eye on the W3C’s HTML5 draft specification document (although its not particularly easy reading).

Geolocation (demo)

With HTML 5, you should be able to make web apps that can determine your location and provide you more relevant information.

Video / Audio tags (demo)

Providing everyone can eventually agree on a video and audio codec that is suitable (I’m rooting for OGG), we will soon be able to include media in the same way we include images. Simple tags without the need for both Flash and JavaScript. You may want to take a look at: video for everybody, a step towards achieving this today.

Canvas (demo)

The canvas element allows for scriptable bitmaps – essentially this means we can draw images in real time to the browser window. Most examples kicking around at the moment demonstrate graphing (pie charts etc) however this could be taken much further.

Local / offline storage (demo)

With applications moving to the cloud it makes sense for us to be able to access and edit our content when our internet connection is down or unavailable. Google realised this with Gears.

Content-Editable (demo)

Any elements with the “contenteditable” attribute set will be editable through the browser window. This has some huge implications in the way we manage content online and should lead to a new breed of content management systems. This is also one of the few HTML5 features already implemented in all of the latest browsers.

Our final recommendation is that you grab a copy of the HTML5 cheat sheet, its a useful resource to check the mark up your writing is supported and valid. At toggle we are going to begin exploring HTML5, it looks promising for the future of the web, but it is also worth remembering that some of the features being talked about might not even be the same (or exist at all) when the final draft rolls out.

My Riverford organic veg box arrived last week. For those not familiar with Riverford, each box contains a newsletter written by Guy Watson (Founder of Riverford Organic Farm). In this particular newsletter he was talking his motivations behind Riverford. These were similar to those behind toggle and the article struck a cord because it coincided with our launch of the laundry service.

“As Yasmina triumphed over Kate as Alan Sugar’s apprentice, we hear Sir Alan is to become a Lord and government advisor on enterprise. Brash, competitive and aggressively selfish behavior makes compelling viewing but has precious little to with good business. I can’t help enjoying the show; I even suspect there is a fair amount of integrity and honesty in the down-to-earth, finger wagging, boy-done-good Sir Alan’s approach, but sales and short-term deal making are just a small part of business. Most successful businesses spend far more time building long-term relationships with their suppliers and customers than they do striking short-term deals.

I stepped out of school in the unbridled market mania of the Reagan/Thatcher years. After a few years milking cows I packed my bags, bought a snappy suit and threw myself into the throng in London and New York as a management consultant. It was lucrative and great fun, but, for me, ultimately soul sapping and it was only two years before I was back on the farm. The unquestioning idolatry of the marketplace as the only valid solution, whether in education, health, climate change or school dinners continued unabated through the Blair/Clinton neo-liberalism. Meanwhile I grew my vegetables and business with an increasing sense that there must be a better way – and a determination to find it. My beef with the Sir Alan approach is that by viewing every object, person and situation as a trade commodity we ultimately belittle the human condition and denigrate our lives as a result….I may not have done as well as Sir Alan, but the belief that good business should be based on serving the genuine, long-term needs of all stakeholders is gaining ground.”

A fantastic lecture called ‘Morals and Markets’ by Professor Michael Sandel (something Mike had already passed around the toggle office) was mentioned at the end of the newsletter. If you are not already familiar with it, it’s definitely worth checking out. The lecture discusses the need for politics that encourage a more morally engaged public life – it looks at the moral limits of markets and how there are some things money can buy but shouldn’t. But that’s another blog post…

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

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

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

OpenGoo

The sales pitch:

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

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

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

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

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

Pope Street, SE1

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

Worldview Space

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

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

toggle

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

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

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

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

Office

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

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

Website

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

Shop

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

Going mobile

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

toggle design laundry service ™

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

The main downfalls

Banking

As you all know, when you open a bank account you have forms to sign, you get posted pin codes, terms and conditions for banking, welcome packs, banking cards, cheque books, paying in books, login details for online banking, further reading for services you may need in the future, paperwork to close your old account – and all this information arrives in paper envelopes! About 3 months ago we decided to move bank accounts. Wading through old paperwork and replacing it with the new, really made us realise just how much waste paper banking generates.

Inland Revenue

We regularly receive information from the Inland Revenue (a copy of the same information is also sent to our accountant) about VAT , pay etc which usually comes in the form of an A4 envelope with a letter and a CD in a cardboard sleeve.

The need to get creative

Sometimes you just need to work on paper.

When given a brief I like to sketch. My head is full of ideas and I need to get them down visually and as quickly as possible. I find this much easier than jumping straight on the computer because it’s easy to get caught up with details rather than idea generation.

Useful tools and services

CD recycling

London Recycling service operate free CD and DVD recycling. All you have to do is post your box of CD’s and they do the rest,

“The CD material is delivered to the decollaion centre where the constituent parts are separated. Paper is baled, pulped and used in the production of cardboard. The jewel case is granulated and then fed into an extrusion system fitted with a laser filter for contaminant removal. A high quality Crystal Polystyrene pellet is produced and may be used for new cases or insulating foam. The discs are processed in another machine and paint, aluminium and data is removed from the surface. This is used to insulate electric cables.The clean discs are granulated, blended and compounded into a polycarbonate material. This is reused to make burgular alarm boxes or street lighting.”

Google Docs

We make full use of Gmail, Google Docs and the Google Calendars on a daily basis. The great thing about the apps is the collaboration; sharing not only between ourselves but with our clients too. Clients can just paste their content into a Google Doc which saves sending it on CD.

PDFs

Generating PDF rather than paper proposals and invoices wherever possible.

Not getting company stationery printed

We decided very early on not to get company stationery (letterheads and compliment slips) printed. One of the main reasons for this was that we were going to try and make use of as many digital services as possible to save on paper. There were also budget reasons – to get even simple stationery printed would have taken a large chunk out of our budget as there are minimum sheet orders.

Instead we bought some good quality paper and just print them as and when we need them. We will be moving offices in a few weeks (more details coming soon) and we are very glad we didn’t get them printed because we have sent less than 20 letters in 18 months of business.

Moo minicards

Moo minicards are only 70mm x 28mm compared to the standard business card size of 80mm x 55m. Using minicards instead of standard business cards means we are using half the amount of materials per business card. Why are business cards so big!?!

Dropbox

Dropbox is a tool that enables you to sync and large files across the internet and computers. Dropbox has proved an invalauble tool here because it means we can share large files (like video) with our clients without the use of CD’s and DVD’s.

Reuse

Reusing old printouts for sketching on.

Conclusion

Anyone who claims to be paper free probably isn’t. How can you stop post coming through your door? Although we aren’t completely paper free, we are using as many tools as possible to continually reduce the amount of paper we consume at toggle HQ.