This Friday marks the second annual Flash Camp St. Louis at The City Museum. The best freelancers and and agency flashers in the land will come together once again to talk shop and hopefully learn a few things.
This year I will be presenting a demo called, “Tween, the Impossible Tween” at 3pm. And if you haven’t signed up yet, I think there are still a few seats remaining. Go grab your tickets and I’ll meet you at the 6 story slide.
As part of FEAST magazine’s cross-media branding, TOKY designed the look and feel of the website — including the various templates for all pages.
When we design for the web, we try to work as closely as possible with developers throughout the development cycle in an effort to maintain the integrity of the original design. We are a “pixel-perfect” shop, and we live for typographic perfection from design through development.
Often, when we are asked to hand over our Photoshop files, we don’t get an opportunity to interact with the developers as a site is being built or review the site before it goes live. That was the situation with FEAST, and rarely produces a truly great site. Developers are hard-pressed to stitch so many pieces of a site together before launch that they often overlook the “details” that they deem inconsequential.
The FEAST site almost gets it right, except for a few of those overlooked details here and there. These details are, of course, what distinguish great from good. Here are a few examples of some discrepancies we noticed. TOKY’s comps are on the left or on top; the live site on the right or bottom.
1. The developers decided to implement an HTML font for the navigation instead of the more branded, bolder typeface we had selected.
2. Additionally, the navigation drop menus use a different font and the line-spacing is much tighter in the final version, and the dividing rules are black and not reversed, giving the menus a cramped feeling.
3. We designed the “Most Commented” and “Most Read” tabs to work with the color palette of the site; these were changed in development as well as the left alignment of the copy, creating a jagged scanning and reading experience for the visitor. Additionally, the “Read More/Get The Recipe” button is misaligned, and the letterspacing in the design was overlooked.
For the most part, the site functions as it should. We hope that as the site evolves the development team will go back and revisit the original comps in an effort to polish up the elements that have been overlooked. Until then, it’s more famine than FEAST. See for yourself: www.feaststl.com
St. Louis now has its own Egotist: thestlouisegotist.com. The Egotist is an online creative hub focused on the local creative community, and St. Louis is one of a handful of cities to have one. We’re not sure who runs or manages this site, and we’re not sure we care — but we do know that we think its yet another great asset for this town.
For the launch, they asked if they could feature TOKY as the first studio profile. Check out the link below for Eric’s responses to the few interview questions. It may help understand how we do things around here:
“TOKY is devoted to the arts. We’ll do everything we can to spread the word about the fantastic scene here. We’ll do whatever we can to build attendance, bring in the best artists and performers, and keep the money coming in to make it all happen. Then we’re not competing with just Des Moines for talent and reputation, but Santa Fe and Austin and New Orleans and Portland and San Francisco and Chicago and New York.”
We’re honored to have been invited to speak at the AdClub’s upcoming “Beyond The Addys” luncheon event, Thursday, May 6, at Maggiano’s Little Italy in The Boulevard on Brentwood.
We’ll be on a panel with creatives from Rodgers Townsend, Cannonball and other agencies. We’ll be “going behind the scenes to look at campaigns that won ADDYs in this year’s competition: how the idea originated, how those concepts are pitched to clients” .. and we’ll probably blather on about our team and point of view. I’m sure it will be more fun than I make it sound, due mostly to quantities of expense-report purchased beer.
More information at the AdClub’s site, or by calling 314.231.4185, or writing nanadclub@aol.com.
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.
Calligraphic fonts bedevil me. So, when I saw this ad I thought it was an example of what I like to call a “can’t see the forest for the trees” font. But, no, it was a typo in a Wall Street Journal ad! I feel the company’s pain on many levels (we’ve concealed their name to protect the innocent) – as a copywriter, as an unofficial proofreader who lives in fear of a “can’t see the forest for the trees” typo, as a marketer who imagines how much revenue this ad was supposed to generate, and as someone of Italian descent. So, designers and writers: be careful out there!
For the promotion of the upcoming opening of Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, TOKY helped the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts implement a guerrilla marketing campaign, printing advertisements on scraps of debris (ceiling tiles, drywall, wood, wallpaper, etc.) and scattered them around St. Louis. Printing was done by the hands of our friends at the Pulitzer, which were printed at a local print shop, All Along Press.
The opening for the exhibition is this Friday, October 30th from 5-9pm. (more info/rsvp)
Rachel ( from the Pulitzer) holds up a sample.
Amy ( from the Pulitzer) testing out the screen.
The invite placed amongst the media.
Every other month our staff meeting is pulled from the studio to take place in another setting. Sometimes it’s a baseball game, bar or a park… this time, it was Flamingo Bowl on Washington Avenue. Here are a few pics from the event, we’ll let you judge how productive this meeting was…
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Once Geoff got over his fear of Elephant trunks sniffing him in random places, we ended up with a pretty successful photo scouting mission for an upcoming shoot. Bud’s a pretty smart and friendly guy, and played nice all for just a few carrots. Go pay him a visit next time you’re at Grant’s Farm in St. Louis!
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