Here’s a look at the TOKY work that’s being recognized this year:

1. “Texts in the City” Invitation, St. Louis Public Library Foundation (related blog post)

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2. Contemporary Fund Mailer, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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3. “Share the Season” Packaging, Panera Bread (related blog post)

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4. stylus box/catalogue, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

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5. Grab grassy this moment your I’s catalogue, Laumeier Sculpture Park (related blog post)

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6. 2011 Season Poster, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

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7. Dreamscapes website, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

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Click here to view the embedded video.

8. “Design Legends of St. Louis“ Video Series, AIGA St. Louis (one of five videos is shown above)

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9. “Return to Summer” In-Store, Panera Bread (related gallery at Facebook)

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10. “Share the Season” In-Store, Panera Bread (related blog post)

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11. “A Tasteful Affair” Invitation, Food Outreach

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Our thanks to the ADDY judges who have recognized this work! We’re looking forward to celebrating St. Louis creativity with our colleagues at the February ceremony.

In November, we were thrilled to announce that for the second year in a row, TOKY would be included in Communication Arts’ Typography Annual, the magazine’s juried review of the best typographic design around the world. There were 1,723 projects submitted, and just 150 winners.

This year’s judges — Richard Kegler, Erik Spiekermann, and Tiffany Wardle de Sousa — selected TOKY’s identity for Core of Discovery, which colorfully integrates downtown St. Louis’ historic attractions into a single brand system. TOKY, working with our strategic partners at The Standing Partnership, developed the concept, the name for the district, the brand strategy, media plan, all collateral, and advertising.

Communication Arts’ January/February Typography Annual has now hit TOKY HQ, so we’re pleased to share this look at a few of our favorite pages!

Check out a sample of some of the tamer photos on the evening. If you want to see the rest… well, you’ll need to be friends with Mr. Geoff Story on Facebook to see those.

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.

We’ve been very pleased at the enthusiastic reception for this year’s Gala invitation for the St. Louis Library Foundation. For the last two years we’ve created iconic invitations to this signature fundraising event (here and here), and we always try to top ourselves.

This year’s invitation was especially challenging, since the theme we were working with seemed to lead down the route of a simple “Sex In The City” parody. Instead, our designer Mary Rosamond came up with a wonderfully clever way to take real literary texts and weave them together into an evocative passage about a gala party under the stars in a faraway sparkling city. The passage is paired with illustrations handcrafted from bits of found book and advertising ephemera. Mary designed a custom accordion fold, “so that it would look like you were turning through the pages of the books quoted in the story, make you feel like you were entering into the story, with characters coming to life on the pages.”

It was a good solution – a format that fit the content well, was out of the ordinary, yet very cost effective to produce. The result is hauntingly beautiful, childlike, and quietly elegant all at the same time.

The “Texts and the City” Gala, to benefit the St. Louis Public Library Foundation and the renovation of our magnificent Central Library, takes place November 19 at St. Louis City Hall. Tickets are available here.

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

For the second year in a row, TOKY will have work included in Communication Arts’ juried review of the world’s best typographic design. This year, the judges have selected our Core of Discovery branding, a new marketing concept that integrates all of downtown St. Louis’ historic attractions into an easy-to-understand consumer-facing brand system. TOKY, working with our strategic partners at The Standing Partnership, developed the concept, the name for the district, the brand strategy, media plan, all collateral and advertising. The project will be included in the January/February issue of Communication Arts magazine.

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

This summer saw the launch of TOKY’s first project with Panera Bread, the nationally prominent bakery-cafe company. After winning the assignment last December, TOKY created a “Return to Summer” campaign, crafting a wide range of materials — in-store banners, bakery-cafe signage, greeting stands, catering materials, and merchandise signage — that were handsomely installed in all of Panera’s almost 1,500 bakery-cafes in 40 states across the country. (We know you probably saw this work as you stood in line debating what to order!)

TOKY led the campaign’s concept development, wrote original copy, art directed the photography and letterpress lettering, and executed all components. We found a terrific partner in Panera’s creative team, and enjoyed working with Boston-based photographer Francine Zaslow. This was a satisfying project with an especially wide reach.

While summer has slipped away, we’ve collected a few photographs of the campaign from select Panera cafes.
View the Facebook gallery for more!