This Friday marks the second annual Flash Camp St. Louis at The City Museum. The best freelancers and and agency flashers in the land will come together once again to talk shop and hopefully learn a few things.
This year I will be presenting a demo called, “Tween, the Impossible Tween” at 3pm. And if you haven’t signed up yet, I think there are still a few seats remaining. Go grab your tickets and I’ll meet you at the 6 story slide.
The editors at St. Louis Magazine had a very cool idea for their September issue cover story. In their words, “We contacted about 50 especially informed, creative, and influential St. Louisans and asked: If we gave you a check for $10 million, what’s the single project you would create to transform or improve St. Louis?”
Beaming from the flattery of being one of the 50 people asked, we brainstormed many ways to spend the hypothetical $10 million. Thinking big wasn’t the problem. Dam the Mississippi at Kimmswick to create a massive recreational lake below St. Louis? Even $10 million wouldn’t get that done. How about paying off ABInBev to get control of the brewery back in St. Louis? Or paying all of our City public school teachers what their counterparts in the County make? All too expensive.
Eventually we came around to an idea we’ve been working on for a while with Grand Center, St. Louis’ arts and culture district, and the neighborhood just west of our home in Midtown Alley. We proposed enlivening this theatre and museum district at night with artists’ sculptural works that deal with light and lighting. Think of it as a 10-block long sculpture park that springs to light at dusk.
We see at least 12 opportunities for light sculpture in the district, from Strauss Park to the Scottish Rite parking garage. The magazine has made us one of two respondents profiled on their website. Check it out, read the article, and tell us what you think!
Shots of last Friday’s Street Fest from the TOKY window throughout the evening. The street was packed for several hours throughout the event, all the way from Garrison to Compton. Likely 2-3 times more people than the previous year, despite the threat of thunderstorms. Thanks to all who came out, and look forward to next years Street Fest!
Bruce Burton has joined TOKY as Senior Designer on the print team, coming to us from the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
It’s time once again for Midtown Alley Street Fest. Last years event was a hit, and this one looks to be bigger and better. In just the few short years since we’ve been working in this neighborhood, we’ve seen major improvements like great new restaurants, new businesses and tons of historic old buildings brought back to life. Come by next Friday for free music from 6 bands, food from some of the great spots and tons of other activities. Locust Street from Garrison to Compton will be closed off for pedestrians, and bands will play right on the street. Should be a good night!
Midtown Alley Street Fest 2010
Friday August 20th, 2010
4-11pm on Locust Street from Compton to Garrison
More information and RSVP at the Facebook page
Last week we celebrated the 10 year work anniversary of Jay David, our web team ACD, with a surprise party, too much food, some great gifts and a fantastic video surprise: a 2 minute video from the legendary (or infamous) Fred and Sharon’s Movies! Not only was Jay surprised but also embarrassed beyond belief. Mission accomplished!
Our friend and client Dave Bailey, the brains behind St. Louis’s “Chocolate Bar”, “Bridge” and “Rooster“, alerted us to this Mexican doppleganger.
Apparently some enterprising restauranteurs wanted to open a breakfast place in Isla Mujeres this year, but didn’t want to go through the hassle of actually having to work with a design company. Instead, they nicked Rooster’s name, logo, and signage. Pollo loco.
As part of FEAST magazine’s cross-media branding, TOKY designed the look and feel of the website — including the various templates for all pages.
When we design for the web, we try to work as closely as possible with developers throughout the development cycle in an effort to maintain the integrity of the original design. We are a “pixel-perfect” shop, and we live for typographic perfection from design through development.
Often, when we are asked to hand over our Photoshop files, we don’t get an opportunity to interact with the developers as a site is being built or review the site before it goes live. That was the situation with FEAST, and rarely produces a truly great site. Developers are hard-pressed to stitch so many pieces of a site together before launch that they often overlook the “details” that they deem inconsequential.
The FEAST site almost gets it right, except for a few of those overlooked details here and there. These details are, of course, what distinguish great from good. Here are a few examples of some discrepancies we noticed. TOKY’s comps are on the left or on top; the live site on the right or bottom.
1. The developers decided to implement an HTML font for the navigation instead of the more branded, bolder typeface we had selected.
2. Additionally, the navigation drop menus use a different font and the line-spacing is much tighter in the final version, and the dividing rules are black and not reversed, giving the menus a cramped feeling.
3. We designed the “Most Commented” and “Most Read” tabs to work with the color palette of the site; these were changed in development as well as the left alignment of the copy, creating a jagged scanning and reading experience for the visitor. Additionally, the “Read More/Get The Recipe” button is misaligned, and the letterspacing in the design was overlooked.
For the most part, the site functions as it should. We hope that as the site evolves the development team will go back and revisit the original comps in an effort to polish up the elements that have been overlooked. Until then, it’s more famine than FEAST. See for yourself: www.feaststl.com
Sometimes the work we do takes a long time to gestate. Way back in 2006 TOKY worked with St. Louis’ Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance to help rebrand an area of Old North St. Louis that was ready to come back to life. We advised the RHCDA to use as the cornerstone of the brand the one asset they had in the area with high public recognition… Crown Candy Kitchen. In St. Louis, everybody knows Crown Candy. Heck, even that “Man Vs. Food” guy knows Crown Candy (and its bathrooms).
We used Crown Candy’s high consumer recognition to build the entire neighborhood brand, and Crown Village was born. This was an area where urban pioneers could buy homes for ridiculously low prices, literally minutes from downtown. Our positioning theme hammered that point home, taking a subtle swipe at the hyper-inflated prices of Washington Avenue’s tony lofts: “Great City Living, Without the Lofty Price.” The logo was made up of letterforms from the old commercial signs in the old 14th Street Mall.
Yesterday at a ceremony attended by lots of the City’s muckety-mucks, Crown Village debuted “Crown Square” which is (according the RHCDA site) “the most significant redevelopment to take place in the Old North Saint Louis historic neighborhood in many decades. This ambitious undertaking includes the historic rehabilitation of 27 buildings into 80 mixed-income apartments, townhouses, lofts and live-work spaces and 34,000 square feet of street level commercial space, with an array of ‘green building’ features built into the development. It includes the removal of the two-block long ‘pedestrian mall,’ tying the neighborhood back together with new streets, sidewalks, lighting, parking and other public amenities.”
Congrats to RHCDA and Old North. It’s been a long time coming!
All this week we’re taking a look at the art direction and design TOKY did for St. Louis’ new FEAST Magazine. Our “Tablescapes” concept was a fantastical cityscape made of crockery, populated with miniature people to make it appear larger than life — and tongue in cheek.
After Feast staff shopped for 60+ products from six stores (OK, seven including the mini people), we got the shot list down to 41 unique shots. Photographer Ashley Gieseking then shot over 500 images to get the final 30 raw files needed. All of the photography was done in TOKY’s in-house photo studio, all in one loooong day. After the initial retouching and image clipping, we spent the next two days stitching it together in a massive retouching marathon, and we had three shots for the spreads above. Whew! Thank goodness it didn’t get changed after we turned it over to the editors.
Special shout outs to Ashley for her dedication and patience!
This week we’re celebrating the launch of FEAST Magazine, the new publication from the suddenly very profitable Lee Enterprises. For the last three and a half months, the TOKY team has been eating and drinking FEAST layouts, all in secret as the mag prepared its launch.
Above are a couple of spreads from the 8-page White Barn feature story we designed around Tuan Lee’s wonderful photo essay (we also did the logo, grid system, all look and feel, many of the section story designs and the website design and CSS… but more on that later…). The White Barn is a cult destination for foodies and junk food aficionados in St. Louis. It’s the heart and soul of a 75 year old fireball named Rich Robson, who says “I love the people, and I love to work — and I like to flirt with the ladies.”
Our spreads have been pretty much unchanged from our final turn-over files to printed pieces. The only real changes we noted are that all the captions have mysteriously vanished, leaving empty little undesigned white pockets of space. Ah, well… I’m certain Roger Black has disappointments, too.
By the way, at FEAST’s debut party we spotted Mr. Robson standing quietly in a corner, and Katy and Liz from our team asked him for a photo. He’s kind of a hero around TOKY. He still loves the ladies. Looks like the ladies love him back.
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis was profiled in this week’s St. Louis Business Journal in “Opera Theatre rewarded for bet on ‘Golden Ticket’ “. The line we were most proud of: “Opera Theatre’s 2010 box-office revenue hit a record, topping $1.8 million. Attendance for 2010 was up 5.5 percent from 2008, with 22 percent of the audience being new to Opera Theatre.”
Opera Theatre is one of our favorite clients, having worked with them on advertising, branding and design for seven years. If you saw “Golden Ticket” you know how great it was (and the super typographic sets were a graphic designer’s dream), so it’s nice to see the bet paid off for them.
Bravo, Opera Theatre!
We attended the debut launch party of Catherine Neville’s new FEAST Magazine last night, and finally got our hands on a copy of the real thing.
After 100 days of immersing ourselves in the design of everything FEAST — from the new logo to the grid structure to the look and feel of the publication to the CMS-driven web site design — as well as final design of the magazine’s two main feature stories — it was nice to see the first issue printed and looking, well… pretty OK.
There were a lot of changes that we noticed in the magazine from our original files, but that’s to be expected as magazine designers turn over templates to internal art directors (kudos to Lisa Triefenbach, the magazine’s new AD, for getting this issue to the finish line!).
So we’re going to make this week a full-on feast of “FEAST” on our blog. We think this will be a nice way to present the reality of how designs can change from the designer’s hands to final execution, and to celebrate the arrival of a long-expected labor of love for Katy, Liz, Kirsten, and Becky on our team.
Today, a before and after of the first issue’s cover. The TOKY team designed this WEEKS ago (and were asked to keep the subject on the hush-hush) and finally saw the printed copies for the first time last night. The changes that we noted are subtle but interesting for students of design: the red FEAST logo has gone yellow and lost it’s shading behind Tuan Lee’s monumental burger, our more understated white type headline has been boxed in honkin’ white bars, and the lack of yellow highlights in the above-the-logo teasers. Otherwise… pretty much what we designed.
Tomorrow: the White Barn Burgers feature story — before and after.
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