July 2010
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.
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.
April 2010
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.
February 2010
Last week, TOKY launched the final phase of the Transformation website for The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. It’s a website that ties in the public programs aspect of the Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition that is currently on display at The Pulitzer.
At TOKY, we always try to push ourselves design wise and development wise. On the web, it seems like there is always something that everyone is talking about. For the past six months, that something was Typekit. It’s a web service that enables designers and developers to use fonts outside of the 15 or so ’safe’ fonts that are available across all platforms. Their website states that they will “change the way you design websites.” It’s a lofty goal.
We decided to give it a try on the Transformation website. We used Pill Gothic 300mg by Betatype. Pill was used in the print materials for the the exhibition, and we hoped to use the font to tie in the web aspect as well.
We were a little skeptical when originally researching Typekit. Primarily because we don’t believe it is the ideal solution for bringing new fonts to the web. It’s a javascript solution. So, in essence it’s a hack. However, browser makers along with the type foundry legal teams can’t seem to agree on a way to bring fonts to the web en masse. So, for the time being this is one of the few options we have available.
Overall, it’s a nice service with an easy to use interface. And all that is needed to bring Typekit to your site is one line of code. So I think it will have a very nice future. But in the present, we just ran into too many quirks and issues.
Some of the issues in particular:
- All the weights were not available on Windows. It was regular or bold only.
- Bold in PC Firefox was virtually unreadable.
- We disabled Typekit in some browsers. All PC Firefox, all Safari versions and Firefox 3.0 on all platforms don’t get served Typekit. Instead they get a separate css file to make Arial look proper.
- Download speed. Typkit makes it possible to use many fonts on one site. This site is only using one font. And it has to download over 200kb just for one font. This causes a bit of a delay, so you see Arial for a second or two, and then it snaps to Pill. I can’t imagine the delay when using multiple fonts.
- The biggest problem for us is that it doesn’t consistently work. It doesn’t matter the browser and it doesn’t matter the operating system. Sometimes the fonts just don’t show up in the page — even though we could see that the browser did in fact download the fonts from Typekit.
Here is a screen capture of the weights across browsers and platforms:
While we were able to work around most of these issues, I don’t think we will make it a habit of recommending Typekit in the near future.
February 2010
The site we developed for Saint Louis University’s Parks College of Engineering went live Friday. Following on the heels of our well-received Parks view book, we worked hand in hand with the SLU Parks team pulling off one of the largest, most complex sites we’ve ever designed and developed. And it’s all the better that, like McCarthy.com, it’s built on TOKY’s proprietary MYOS Content Management System, making it faster and easier for the SLU team to update. Great work by Jay, Tyler, Melissa, Kathy, Jacob, and the rest of the TOKY web team!
