Development | TOKY Branding + Design

Archive for the Development Category

November 2011

The CAM iPhone App Has Arrived!

Our work over the past year rebranding the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has seen the launch of a new identity, new messaging and signage, completely revamped print collateral and an overhaul of the website including a custom content management system. Now, we’re pleased to announce the latest extension of the brand — the CAM St. Louis iPhone App.

The CAM App will provide users with a unique experience each time they launch the app. If launched within the museum, the interface is designed to act as an accessible tool that will help visitors navigate the aesthetic and conceptual landscape of contemporary art. With this app, users will be able to embark on a self-guided digital tour of CAM’s exhibitions currently on view. With each visit, the user is able to move around the space, watch a video tour with architect Brad Cloepfil, listen to the Director speak about the history of the museum, and explore the mission and nature of CAM as a non-collecting institution with Chief Curator Dominic Molon. Continuing the self-guided tour, users will listen as CAM curators introduce them to the work on view. As they explore the artworks, they will actually be able to see and hear the artist(s) talk about specific pieces featured in the show.

Users using the CAM App outside of the museum will be informed as to about how many miles they have to travel before reaching the museum doors. If a user is over 100 miles away, the app functions as an engaging well-designed mobile interface for online museum visitors that represents and enhances the museum’s brand locally, nationally, and internationally. Users are introduced to the CAM mission and programming via several avenues including: access to a shared blog with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the ability to connect with CAM’s social media platforms, and access to the CAM Channel, which contains a wealth of educational and interpretative content focusing on the current exhibition. Users can also watch artist interviews, listen to discussions with curators and educators, or view performances and public programs that occur in the museum’s Performance Space. Those within a local (100 mile) radius will also see an entire calendar including scrolling featured events and programs hosted by the museum year round.

The CAM App is tied in with the website’s custom content management system, allowing the site administrators to make most edits to the app as they edit the site. This eliminates duplicating efforts and keeps the app content synced with the website content.

Congratulations to CAM for their part in making this a reality. As one of the first museums to launch a fully customized App in St. Louis and joining a handful of leading museums nationally, CAM continues to be a leader in the museum and art fields.

Download the CAM App here
View More of our work for CAM in a Facebook Gallery

Android version of the App to be launched towards the end of 2011.

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Apps, Development, Featured, Interactive, Museum Branding

November 2011

New Grand Center Website is Live

We’re big fans and supporters of the Grand Center District of St. Louis. It has been great to see the resurgence in the area that is spreading all throughout Midtown. The neighborhood has undergone major transformation since TOKY last designed the site in 2005, and their online presence needed to do the same.

With the new website, GrandCenter.org is now the resource for all events, venues, and developments in the area. Grand Center is home to more than 30 arts organizations that demonstrate the depth and diversity of the city’s cultural life, and now that message is more clearly displayed right up front. Users are welcomed to the site with a randomly populating display of images that link to the most upcoming events. Grand Center site administrators update content in one place to save time managing the constantly changing calendar of events.

This site is a great case study for why sometimes it’s better (and more efficient) to use a custom content management solution to build a site. At no time in the discovery and information architecture part of the process were we forced to retrofit other templated solutions to the site. This means we could create the calendar exactly the way that worked best for Grand Center. In the end, Grand Center has a site that accommodates for multiple unique scheduling scenarios and is flexible for strategic growth in the years to come. Just like the neighborhood.

Check out GrandCenter.org

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Arts and Culture Branding, Development, Eero, Featured, Interactive, St. Louis

October 2011

New Work: World Chess Hall of Fame

Chess pre

In July, we were proud to announce that the World Chess Hall of Fame had come to TOKY to develop and build its website, in preparation for its fall 2011 opening in St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood. Our preliminary site, shown above, provided a count-down lead-up to the Hall of Fame’s official September kick-off. When the institution opened its doors last month — across the street, conveniently and strategically, from the Chess Club & Scholastic Center of Saint Louis — the full site went live.

Chess live 1

Chess live 3

Chess live 2

TOKY’s design is a clear nod to the chess-board grid, with a few related smaller touches here and there (with a quick click up top, users can ‘switch sides’ … and color schemes.) We built the site to run on Eero™, TOKY’s own from-scratch CMS that provides a great deal of flexibility and future control for clients. A few highlights from the project:

Robust calendar features (including tagging), which allow the Hall of Fame to easily promote their events
Dead-simple video and audio embedding
Tight social media integration, allowing users to share pages and RSVP for events on Facebook
Large images for highlighting the remarkable objects on view in the Hall of Fame’s rotating exhibitions
Smart exhibition archiving, a feature that will kick in as the Hall of Fame gets older

TOKY has been proud to be part of St. Louis’ ascension as a U.S. chess capital — with the thriving Chess Club & Scholastic Center of Saint Louis hosting national events, two recent “Chess City of the Year” titles from the United States Chess Federation, and now the World Chess Hall of Fame. It’s an exciting addition to our home city.

Stephen Schenkenberg

Posted by Stephen Schenkenberg
Development, Interactive

July 2011

Saint Louis Welcomes The World Chess Hall of Fame This Fall

We just launched a preliminary site for The World Chess Hall of Fame, a new venue opening in the Central West End in September, across the street from the Chess Club & Scholastic Center of Saint Louis. Since opening in 2008, the Club has helped our city become a national hub for the game—Saint Louis earned the “Chess City of the Year” title from the United States Chess Federation for 2009 and 2011.

The grand opening is set for September 9, 2011, at 4652 Maryland Avenue in the Central West End. The full site will launch around then as well, with a growing collection of Grand Masters, Exhibitions dedicated to the art of Chess, and Community Outreach resources.

Kirsten O'Loughlin

Posted by Kirsten O'Loughlin
Arts and Culture Branding, Development, Interactive

March 2011

Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis Site a “Communication Arts” Site of the Week

We’re very happy that the new site we designed and developed for CAM has been chosen as a Communication Arts “Web Pick of the Week“.

Every day Communication Arts does a fantastic job selecting a Web Pick of the Day, but it’s always nice when the judges select one of those for special recognition and a more in-depth feature. This is our second Web Pick of the Week from CA (the other here), and we’ve had several CA Web Picks of the Day (here, here, and here).

The site for CAM, now only two months old, was a key part of a total rebranding by TOKY. Look for an in-depth case study on all of the CAM rebranding work, to be featured on this site soon.

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is known for its ever-changing programming and deep community outreach. Exhibits in the main galleries rotate every three months, biweekly mini-shows cycle through its energetic Front Room, and a parade of social events and fundraisers take place every month. Despite this, the Contemporary felt it wasn’t doing enough to present its art and artists in a way that would attract a public beyond die-hard art lovers. They asked TOKY to help broaden their appeal to the general public, take the trepidation out of a trip to see contemporary art, and help the Contemporary become a must-go social destination.

In addition to the site design, TOKY rebranded the museum by its acronym CAM, created a new brand identity, developed a new graphic language and external personality, and began the process of uniting print, advertising, web, and social media strategies.

Read more about the site on the Communication Arts site. Below is an overview of some of the key pages of the site.

Built on Eero, TOKY’s propriety Content Management System, the homepage slideshow automatically pulls the latest events, latest exhibitions and programs onto the home page. Now CAM can update virtually all content on the site easily, and without digging into the code or creating custom graphic assets. Because CAM’s new site is so event focused, it was crucial to hone the workflows so that content entry could be done in one place, and feed out to the areas it needs to appear — and, more importantly, update and archive automatically, eliminating much of the legwork which the previous site had forced on CAM’s staff.

One of the more robust features of the site is the new Calendar. Now CAM can easily feature, categorize, share, and archive events, all while using the site to show more faces of the community and images of events past.

With two galleries which consistently showcase emerging artists, CAM needed a tool to promote and manage ongoing exhibitions. Additionally, the new CAM site can now archive all past exhibitions; they are currently archiving exhibitions from years when CAM was called the Forum for Contemporary Art.

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Arts and Culture Branding, Awards + Press, Development, Eero, Featured, Identity, Interactive, Museum Branding, Strategy

February 2011

A New Website for The Saint Louis Brewery

Also known for brewing our very own Schlafly beer and serving up great times at their two breweries — The Tap Room and Bottleworks — The Saint Louis Brewery came to us for a complete overhaul of their website.

We worked closely over the past year with the awesome folks at Schlafly to build a smart site that has plenty of room to grow in the years to come. Built on Eero™, our proprietary CMS, the site boasts a detailed and tasty portfolio of Schlafly’s wide variety of brews, a calendar chock full of nearly daily events and an extensive community section complete with an employee blog.

The backend is customized to accommodate frequent updates to the many styles of beers brewed at Schlafly, to the events calendar and restaurant pages, and throughout the entire site as Schlafly continues to evolve and grow.

We’re very excited to have been a part of this effort with Schlafly. They are indeed one of the bedrocks of the St. Louis community. Three cheers to the new kings of St. Louis Beer!

Kirsten O'Loughlin

Posted by Kirsten O'Loughlin
Announcements, Development, Interactive, Premium Products Branding

February 2011

A New Website for Mid-America Transplant Services

In the midst of the snowmageddon meltdown that didn’t happen, we launched a new site for Mid-America Transplant Services, a not-for-profit organization serving regional organ and tissue procurement for eastern Missouri, southern Illinois, and northeast Arkansas.

MTS has a solid mission—to save lives through excellence in organ and tissue donation. They partner with the national Donate Life^® registry program for Arkansas, Illinois and Missouri, and have extensive programs for donor families dedicated to honoring their loved one’s gift of life.

Before diving into design or development, we worked closely with MTS to determine their needs: their current site was cumbersome to update, and did not accommodate the extensive volume of images and content they needed on the site. We collaborated with MTS on a detailed site map and wireframes of key pages, whittling them to the last detail before we began design.

The result is a fully content-managed, flexible site built on Eero™, our proprietary Content Management System. We also applied a brighter, more contemporary look and feel to their brand, with an updated color palette and typographic adjustments.

The site is a valuable resource of education and information for medical professionals, donor families, recipients & the general public. It also offers a place of respite in the Memories & Miracles section, where anyone can submit and share their story of donation, or browse through a collection of memories from others involved in the donation process.

Kirsten O'Loughlin

Posted by Kirsten O'Loughlin
Development, Healthcare Branding, How We Work, Interactive

July 2010

New Opera Theatre Site Launches

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.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Development, Eero, Interactive

May 2010

Museums and Multitouch

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.

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.

toky

Posted by toky
Awards + Press, Development, Interactive

April 2010

New TOKY Web Site

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.

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Announcements, Development, Featured, How We Work, Inside the Studio, Interactive, People

February 2010

Transformation & Typekit in Review

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.

Tyler Craft

Posted by Tyler Craft
Development

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