July 2010
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!
July 2010
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!
July 2010
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!
July 2010
We got word this week that the 2010 Communication Arts Design Annual juries have selected two TOKY projects for publication. Both the AIGA 15 Show Call for Entries and the Thanksgiving Holiday Card for the Saint Louis Public Library Foundation are in; both are for non-profit clients trying to do a lot with a little. They both rely on a sharp concept, perfect copywriting and an almost minimal design aesthetic. The Design Annual is published every November, and is often seen as one of the most exclusive design competitions.
July 2010
This week a couple of new client projects have had some nice press. First, the DavidRichard Contemporary gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico debuted to glowing reports in Art & Antiques magazine and in the Santa Fe Reporter (no, we didn’t do the site). Then, on Tuesday, Metro’s new Downtown Trolley launched as a part of the Core of Discovery work we’ve been up to eyeballs working on, and got some nice news coverage.We love working for great clients who really make a difference in their communities.
July 2010
TOKY’s identity for Hanke Construction has been selected as one of just sixteen Platinum Award winners (from twelve companies worldwide) in this year’s Graphis Design Annual. The Design Annual features the best international design work of the year in categories from Branding to Environmental Design and Posters.
June 2010
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.
June 2010
In what’s been called “the world’s largest advertising competition”, with over 60,000 entries, the ADDY Awards are the advertising industry’s Oscars. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry for the industry.
Saturday night in New York City, TOKY took home two national ADDY awards: a silver for our “Stranger Than Fiction” gala invitation for the Saint Louis Public Library, and a silver for the Carrolle’s Story video for Dr. Barry Singer.
Other St. Louis companies, including Rogers-Townsend, Waylon Ad, Schupp, and Cannonball also took home an Addy.
June 2010
St. Louis Small Business Monthly magazine reviews marketing every month, and this month they took on this year’s Opera Theatre’s posters. Some nice words from the reviewers, who call them “packed with fantastical, fun contemporary images….dripping with drama… TOKY and OTSL have consistently used this technique for a number of years, building upon the brand year after year.” Tickets to Opera Theatre of Saint Louis are available at www.ExperienceOpera.org
June 2010
Our new website is featured on Communication Arts’ site as Site of the Day (June 1, 2010), our second pick in less than two weeks. After replacing our old site with a “coming soon” page for over a year, it’s nice to see the thing getting some attention. Stay tuned for phase two of the site, adding loads more features and a huge project archive. We should have that up in, oh, a year or so….
May 2010
Our friend Phil Wiseman at McCarthy Construction let us know that this nice article named our site for his company the “Coolest Construction Company Website”. That’s especially sweet as this site was built on our own TOKY-authored Content Management System.
“The construction industry takes the cake for lamest websites. But the St. Louis-based McCarthy Construction bucks the trend … the site has a very informative blog and live Web cams at each of the company’s project sites. For some reason I want to buy steel-toed work boots when I visit the site.”
Thanks, Phil!
May 2010
Today’s (5.20.2010) Communication Arts Web Pick includes a site we recently launched for Metro Transit. By sharing the stories of seven Metro users, this site was part of a successful campaign to convince St. Louis County voters to support a proposition calling for a sales tax increase to restore lost transit service and to expand light rail and bus service.
View the Webpick here or Learn more about the site from a previous entry.
May 2010
The folks from Gestureworks recently featured us in their Gestureworks Developer Showcase.
Some of the gang went to Denver a while back for the 2010 Museums and the Web conference. From what I hear, our booth was the place to be! Maybe folks were hanging around the TOKY booth for all the stimulating conversation. Maybe it was because we were handing out free iPads. I’d like to think at least part of the attention was due to the little interactive multitouch portfolio we put together.
http://www.vimeo.com/11819031
Imagine lanyard-clad conference goers decked out in TOKY trinkets, flipping, flicking, pinching and zooming through content. I only hope the complimentary beverages did not impede the use of both limbs, because this experience was multitouch.
