The Toolshed Origin Story
The Canteen in Bristol in the UK (Yes that is a real Banksy, he's from Bristol )
It all started around 5 years ago, sitting outside, having a beer in the sunshine at a pub in Bristol, in the South West of the UK.
So after a few beers we decided, why don't we team up, make a company and try and find some cool projects to work on?
So after a few beers we decided, why don't we team up, make a company and try and find some cool projects to work on?
🍻
The outside tables we sat at in The Canteen.
Early sketches for Toolshed's brand identity.
We decided on the company name Toolshed because we wanted to emphasise the hand crafted nature of designing and building a digital product.
We wanted the same level of respect and trust for our craft as a carpenter or tradesperson would get when carrying out their projects, so the early brand sketches reflected that too.
We also rely on a large array of different tools to design and build our products, and we liked the image of us working down the bottom of our imaginary garden in our cosy hand built toolshed.
We wanted the same level of respect and trust for our craft as a carpenter or tradesperson would get when carrying out their projects, so the early brand sketches reflected that too.
We also rely on a large array of different tools to design and build our products, and we liked the image of us working down the bottom of our imaginary garden in our cosy hand built toolshed.
The final version of our mark 1 logo (left) and a more illustrative initial sketch version (right)
The final logo featured a minimalist mark of the fictional toolshed married with a typeface inspired by the text lettering from STAR WARS. The blue from the sky became our primary brand colour. There was also definitely some inspiration from The Simpsons.
We also wanted illustration to be a big part of Toolshed's brand identity so we designed the fictional interior and exterior of the Toolshed with us working inside.
An early illustration of us working inside the toolshed
We wanted to be quite creative with the website so we experimented with whether the website might change with the seasons/months or with the time of day.
So now we had a brand identity we built a very simple one pager website and as the illustration seemed perfect for animation we added some CSS effects to make the page more visually interesting.
A screenshot of our toolshed from toolshed.design and a GIF showing the CSS effects
To get our brand our there and try and find cool projects where we lived in Bristol we planned to use a basic Guerrilla style marketing strategy of posters, flyers, and business cards.
We collected all of our initial brand identity assets into our first company style guide.
Now we had a brand identity and marketing strategy it was time to find us some clients and some cool projects...
