Last week, I had the opportunity to give a presentation — “InDesign CS5 Tips & Techniques” — for the Society for Marketing Professional Services St. Louis (SMPS ). My talk featured examples of ways to be more efficient in the leading desktop publishing application, and how to do better work faster. I spoke about creating documents, using images, handling text effectively, using color, and saving, exporting and printing files.

There were about 30 people in attendance, ranging in age and, from what I could tell, experience with InDesign. (Also, geography: one gentleman drove all the way in from Columbia, Mo.!) My thanks to those who attended and the SMPS team, who provided a large pre-talk breakfast buffet for all and gifted a nifty little bamboo thumb drive to me.

You’re welcome to view a video of the seminar above or on Vimeo’s website.

TOKY’s Adam Fischer, setting up for a shoot inside Grand Center’s Spring Church.

TOKY’s begun 2012 with a brand new conference table, around which new ideas are daily hatched or sharpened. Who’s responsible for the design and build? Our Midtown neighbor, Mirato, a client we teamed up with last fall for a rebrand (including name change) and fresh new website. We’re fans of their work — beautiful designs, eco-friendly materials and process — and love what they’ve made.

Mirato’s Rob Grimm told me yesterday that their team’s goal was to create a piece with “clean, simple style — something that felt very TOKY and was unique to TOKY.” The “vertebra” that runs through the center is an element used in some of Mirato’s other work, but its implementation here is totally new. Rob admitted that getting each of the various pieces lined up perfectly and the surfaces level “took an enormous amount of tweaking,” but the finished product is worth it.

“We stayed true to our core materials for this project,” Rob added, “using only bamboo, steel, and glass” — materials that are rapid-renewable, recycled, or recyclable. He added that the bamboo is in its natural color — it’s been clear-coated but not stained, which means no off-gassing.

Like most creative projects, this one began with a series of sketches. We asked Rob if we could post a few related to this project, and he obliged.

Cheers to the team at Mirato on this project. We’ve have a great time hosting clients around the new table, and look forward to many beautifully productive meetings to come!

Recently Eric and Mary were featured in the special ALIVE Magazine Work Issue (August 2011). The article was part of “My Work, My Story,” which asked seven local entrepreneurs about how they started and what keeps them going.

View the article here, or view using the player below:

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.

TOKY was assigned the task of not only improving the look of the site — incorporating much of the branding TOKY had developed for Metro on the successful Proposition A ballot initiative —  but also to re-conceive and simplify the online experience. Our research found that the old site was hard to navigate, hard to update, and left users frustrated.

We took a step back; we started by rigorously evaluating many other transit organizations in other cities, we listened to user feedback and concerns from Metro staff, we completely reorganized the content structure of the site and conducted analytic research to determine a logical path forward for the site’s growth. Once this was complete, we developed wireframes for key sections of the site and worked with Metro’s internal IT group to make sure our recommendations were able to be implemented.

A few must-haves for the new site: seamless tie-ins with Google Maps, smarter integration with Metro’s advanced Social Media efforts, easier to read and update bus routes and MetroLink station pages that don’t rely on PDFs, and much more.

After several months of consulting and meeting with Metro’s Internal IT development group, our designs have come to life. Metro IT did a fantastic job with the development of the site, and left no small details overlooked. Metro is truly committed to providing a great online experience and it showed throughout this process. We wish them great success as the site continues to evolve and grow with even more intuitive and smart features being added in the coming months.

For more information on the new design, check out Metro’s NextStop Blog.
or visit the new site at: MetroStLouis.org

Project Manager (Interactive Focus)
Senior Account Manager
Animators/Interactive Developers

Each listing above has specific information on how to apply. We look forward to hearing from you!

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.

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.”

Read the full interview here