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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“DART St. Louis is a participatory photography challenge that started with one basic premise – that beauty can be found anywhere by those who seek it. In April 2011 over 250 creative St Louisans threw darts at a huge map of St Louis City. Over the following month, participants visited the area where their dart landed and made a photograph. The resulting collection of photographs show a snapshot of St. Louis as it is today, one random block at a time.”

TOKY designed the logo, the website, helped promote the event, and a couple of us even participated by throwing a dart and shooting the results (seen below). It was an incredible event (a big thanks to Curt von Diest for organizing and managing the event!) that raised a considerable amount of money for Rebuilding Together St. Louis.

Check out the new website for the event at: http://2011.dartstlouis.com

Eric Thoelke’s shot from Cherokee & Michigan

My shot from N. Grand & Page

Jane Winburn’s shot from Euclid and Buckingham Ct.

Jane Nagle’s shot from Boyle and Vandeventer.

Karen Tabaka’s shot from Cote Brilliante & Prarie.

Karen, Katy and Jane working the registration desk at the DART throw event.

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.

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!

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.

Communication Arts is one of the world’s top publications about and for the design profession. Every day, CommArts chooses a single website that, in their view features the best of current design. On January 18, the Site of the Day will be “stylus: a project by ann hamilton”, which TOKY created for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. We worked very closely with both Pulitzer staff and Ms. Hamilton on the site, which uses extensive video, sound, and viewer participation to explore the concepts of community within the Pulitzer show.

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.