The Imprint
A small press for software
Pilcrow Software Ltd is a London-registered company that designs, builds, publishes and looks after apps and websites. We behave rather like a small publishing house: few titles, edited carefully, kept in print.
Why a typographic mark?
Good software, like good typesetting, is mostly invisible. Nobody praises a well-spaced paragraph; they simply read it without stumbling. Nobody thanks a booking form that works; they simply book. We think of an interface as a text the user reads with their thumbs. It has a hierarchy, a rhythm, places to pause and places to keep going. When those are wrong, people feel it as friction even if they cannot name it. So we borrowed a printer's mark as our name, and a printer's habits as our method: draft, proof, correct, proof again, and only then print.
What we are
We are a small company rather than an agency, and we prefer to say so plainly. That means you speak to the people doing the work, and that we take on a limited number of commissions at once so each gets proper attention. Our work spans five areas: mobile app development, web development, UI and UX design, help with publishing apps to the stores, and ongoing IT support for what is live. We do not run a public office for visitors. The City Road address is our registered office for post and company records; conversations happen by video call or at a place convenient to you.
We would rather publish one sound thing than three hurried ones.
How we behave
We write things down: scope, assumptions, decisions, credentials. Memory is a poor archive. We show work in progress early and often, because an early correction costs a sentence and a late one costs a chapter. We name trade-offs instead of hiding them. Speed, cost and breadth pull against each other; you choose, we explain. We leave the manuscript in your hands. Code, design files and accounts belong to your organisation from the outset, and you may take them elsewhere at any time.