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.
Bruce Burton has joined TOKY as Senior Designer on the print team, coming to us from the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
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
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.
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.
Artist Ann Hamilton opened her show “stylus” at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts last night. Hamilton’s work is known for its deep conceptual resonances and playful wit, and “stylus” is no exception.
TOKY is honored to have been chosen to collaborate with Hamilton and the Pulitzer team to create the show’s identity, catalogue, and website. The site and catalogue are concieved to be works in progress, evolving and growing over the lifespan of the show, so check back frequently. We have no idea what’s coming next ourselves…
The show runs through January 22, 2010. For more information see the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts site.
The 2010 Festival season at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis just ended last week, and they’re kicking off the 2011 season with a brand new site. Out with the circa 2004 frills and faux-Victorian embellishments; in with sleek design, highly functional navigation and rock-solid development on TOKY’s MYOS CMS platform. The site ties into OTSL’s Tessitura back-end CRM and e-commerce system, making this site simple on the surface and complex below the surface. In the spirit of OTSL’s famous lawn parties, here’s a champagne toast to the new site.
Congratulations to our friends at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, awarded one of St. Louis Magazine’s “A-List” awards in Culture. They wrote “When the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts showed Matta-Clark this year, it created eight months’ worth of fun, compelling, and relevant programming around the exhibit, including lectures, projects, walking tours, art shows, and a dense, interactive website. It turned the whole city into a staging area for Matta-Clark’s work, truly transforming St. Louis in the process.” That dense, interactive site is here, and the site we did for the GMC exhibit itself is here.
Congratulations to two important St. Louisans for their inclusion in this year’s TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Sister Carol Keehan is the leader of the St. Louis-based Catholic Health Association, a longtime TOKY client. Her courageous advocacy on behalf of sometimes unpopular human rights issues has made her a go-to resource for the Obama administration. “Her leadership of the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) has been defined by advocacy for the poor and an unwavering respect for human dignity…. She fought for those who couldn’t fight for themselves.”
Sister Carol Keehan’s TIME Profile
Brown School’s Michael Sherraden, PhD, is the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, and is also the founder and director of the Brown School’s Center for Social Development. The magazine cites Sherraden’s work on The Global Assets Project, part of his pioneering work on asset building for low-income individuals and families. To quote, “Sherraden, 61, a professor of social development at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., is working to fulfill an ambitious vision: helping poor families accumulate sufficient funds to ride out hard times, buy the crop insurance that protects against drought and blight, insure homes so they can have not only a place to live but also the municipal services that come with a fixed address. He seeks a world in which success is a function of determination and merit, not privilege or political favor.”
Then there are these guys, who many of us TOKY folk *wish* were clients!
We’re honored to have been invited to speak at the AdClub’s upcoming “Beyond The Addys” luncheon event, Thursday, May 6, at Maggiano’s Little Italy in The Boulevard on Brentwood.
We’ll be on a panel with creatives from Rodgers Townsend, Cannonball and other agencies. We’ll be “going behind the scenes to look at campaigns that won ADDYs in this year’s competition: how the idea originated, how those concepts are pitched to clients” .. and we’ll probably blather on about our team and point of view. I’m sure it will be more fun than I make it sound, due mostly to quantities of expense-report purchased beer.
More information at the AdClub’s site, or by calling 314.231.4185, or writing nanadclub@aol.com.
After many months of coming soon messages, thanks to getting pushed to the back of the line for client work, we’re pleased to finally announce that we’ve relaunched our site. This is the second step in our roll out, since there’s a much larger section to come later this Summer. For the next step, we have this grandiose idea of putting the entire project archives of almost all of the work from the last 13 years of TOKY’s existence… that’s a lot of work to write about, gather and photograph.
For now, we have select projects available from the home circle navigation, with full screen case studies of a few projects and announcements, and our People section has been revamped with new ways to find out random information about the people you may already be working with. Visit TOKY.com for more.
Contact Us
email or
call 314.534.2000
