Eero | TOKY Branding + Design

Archive for the Eero Category

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

Photoseed.com Honored as Site of the Week by Communication Arts

TOKY Senior Developer Tyler Craft and I happen to be collectors of historic photos and photogravure prints. (Tyler’s taken his collection to a much deeper place than myself.) When an opportunity arose to work on a project showcasing one of the largest private collections of early photography online, we jumped.

Enter David Spencer (“Spence”), a noted photographic historian, collector, and newspaper photojournalist who has been writing about and collecting early photography for many years. Spence was finally ready to bring his extensive photographic collection to the public, and through various connections came upon meeting Tyler and seeing TOKY’s previous work for collections such as photogravure.com.

After six-plus months of work on random weekends and evenings, we launched an important site and contribution to the photo world (built on Eero™, TOKY’s custom Content Management System). We hope that you will spend some time with PhotoSeed, and that you find beauty in its design and value in its scholarship. We look forward to seeing it grow as Spence continues to add thousands of works to the site throughout the coming years.

We’re also very honored to receive any recognition for work like this, and happy when such a labor of love gets the exposure it deserves.

Visit PhotoSeed.com
View the profile on Communication Arts

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Eero, Featured, Identity, Interactive, People

May 2011

Schlafly.com honored as CommArts “Site of the Day”

Our site for The Saint Louis Brewery — known for brewing our very own Schlafly beer and serving up great times at their two breweries — has been selected as Communication Arts‘ Site of the Day for May 16, 2011.

Built on Eero™, our proprietary CMS, the site features a 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.

We’re honored to be selected for these Communication Arts competitions, the most prestigious design competitions in the world. Since this time last year we’ve had two pieces selected for their 2010 Design Annual, work in the Typography Annual, a Site of the Week for the new CAM site, and Sites of the Day for The Pulitzer, Metro, and TOKY.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Awards + Press, Eero, Featured, Interactive, Premium Products Branding

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

January 2011

Welcome to CAM: A New Brand for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

We’ve been working behind the scenes for the past six months or so to help polish up one of St. Louis’ great cultural assets: the Contemporary Art Museum. The Contemporary team expressed that their brand, as expressed in logo, website, collateral, and even building, had “gone gray”. It felt, they said, too boring, too quiet, too aloof when they wanted to feel engaged with the public, spirited, bright and new.

We realized that the old logo was part of the challenge — a single line of elegantly letter-spaced Univers set without breaks. And it’s sandblasted into the concrete exterior of the building and windows, so it’s going to be an essential part of the Museum for decades to come… no rebranding can ever move forward without acknowledging this original logo in some way.

We broke that logo into a more readable, more usable stack of words, setting them left and right off of a common vertical axis. We also did research and found that only two other museums of contemporary art went by the CAM abbreviation, and neither was geographically proximate. A new consumer-friendly appellation and logo were soon born, now riding on top of that stack of words (see the black tote bag in the image above).

Since then we’ve reimagined the newsletter (top left), posters, mailers, exterior and interior signage, branded merchandise, and built a completely new content-managed website on our proprietary Eero™ CMS. The site went live 1-11-11, and the rest is rolling out this week in advance of the Museum’s opening this Friday night. Come celebrate the new brand with us at CAM!

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Arts and Culture Branding, Branding + Design, Eero, Featured, Identity, Interactive, Museum Branding, Strategy

October 2010

Check Out the Library Foundation’s Site

We’ve just launched a new site for the St. Louis Public Library Foundation. The Foundation is the fundraising and charitable arm of St. Louis’s drop-dead gorgeous Central Library, which is currently raising money to support a much-needed $70 million update.

The new site builds on the “Central To Your World” theme that has been a cornerstone of much of the work TOKY has done for the Library over the past three years, and the attentive will notice a bit of the design language of the exterior banners we designed for our favorite Beaux-Arts masterpiece. It’s built on the same MYOS Content Management System, developed and designed by TOKY, that’s now powering many sites.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Eero, Interactive

October 2010

New Website for the Landscape Architecture Foundation

In the first of what will be much more news regarding our work for clients in Washington D.C., we wanted to share some news on a recent site launch and an event we attended a few weeks back. Over the past several months, TOKY has been working with a great client, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (based in Washington D.C), to overhaul their large site while helping achieve and execute some complex goals for how the new site functions. The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) is where great minds and industry leaders come together to support the preservation, improvement and enhancement of the environment by investing in research and scholarship.

The new site, built on our own Content Management System, was custom-built to support LAF’s initiative, the Landscape Performance Series, which allows architects from all over to upload and share case studies, while increasing opportunities to create a dialogue throughout the industry.

LAF also seems to know how to throw a great party. The annual benefit fundraiser was held on the top of the incredible Newseum (I highly recommend a visit) right along Pennsylvania Avenue. Not only was there a great turnout from architects and designers across the country, we couldn’t have asked for a better evening to sit up along the sky line of the nation’s capital. The sold-out event was the most successful in LAF’s history, raising over $100,000 to support LAF’s research and scholarship programs.

Left: Eric Thoelke (TOKY), Tyler Craft (TOKY), Heather Whitlow (LAF), Barbara Deutsch (LAF) and Jay David (TOKY). Right: Mary Thoelke and Dawn David pose for a shot by Eric on the top of the Newseum.

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Eero, Featured, Interactive, People

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

McCarthy “Coolest Construction Company Website”

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!

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Awards + Press, Eero, Interactive

February 2010

TOKY Launches New SLU Engineering Site

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!

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Development, Eero, Interactive