Interactive | TOKY Branding + Design

Archive for the Interactive Category

August 2010

TOKY designs FEAST’s site: the Devil is in the details

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

Kirsten O'Loughlin

Posted by Kirsten O'Loughlin
Announcements, Featured, How We Work, Interactive

July 2010

Ann Hamilton’s “stylus” at the Pulitzer

Artist Ann Hamilton opened her show “stylus” at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts last night. Hamilton’s work is known for its deep conceptual resonances and playful wit, and “stylus” is no exception.

TOKY is honored to have been chosen to collaborate with Hamilton and the Pulitzer team to create the show’s identity, catalogue, and website. The site and catalogue are concieved to be works in progress, evolving and growing over the lifespan of the show, so check back frequently. We have no idea what’s coming next ourselves…

The show runs through January 22, 2010. For more information see the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts site.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Interactive

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, Interactive, MYOS

June 2010

“A-List” for Pulitzer’s “Gordon Matta-Clark: Transformations”

Congratulations to our friends at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, awarded one of St. Louis Magazine’s “A-List” awards in Culture. They wrote “When the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts showed Matta-Clark this year, it created eight months’ worth of fun, compelling, and relevant programming around the exhibit, including lectures, projects, walking tours, art shows, and a dense, interactive website. It turned the whole city into a staging area for Matta-Clark’s work, truly transforming St. Louis in the process.” That dense, interactive site is here, and the site we did for the GMC exhibit itself is here.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Awards + Press, Interactive

June 2010

TOKY’s New Site is CommArts Site of the Day

Our new website is featured on Communication Arts’ site as Site of the Day (June 1, 2010), our second pick in less than two weeks. After replacing our old site with a “coming soon” page for over a year, it’s nice to see the thing getting some attention. Stay tuned for phase two of the site, adding loads more features and a huge project archive. We should have that up in, oh, a year or so….

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Awards + Press, 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, Interactive, MYOS

May 2010

Museums and Multitouch

The folks from Gestureworks recently featured us in their Gestureworks Developer Showcase.

Some of the gang went to Denver a while back for the 2010 Museums and the Web conference. From what I hear, our booth was the place to be! Maybe folks were hanging around the TOKY booth for all the stimulating conversation. Maybe it was because we were handing out free iPads. I’d like to think at least part of the attention was due to the little interactive multitouch portfolio we put together.

http://www.vimeo.com/11819031

Imagine lanyard-clad conference goers decked out in TOKY trinkets, flipping, flicking, pinching and zooming through content. I only hope the complimentary beverages did not impede the use of both limbs, because this experience was multitouch.

Jacob Heberlie

Posted by Jacob Heberlie
Awards + Press, Development, Interactive

April 2010

Getting On Board with Metro Transit

Recently, we launched a site for Metro Transit in St. Louis as part of the continuing “I’m On Board with Metro” campaign. As one small facet of this large branding campaign, we helped Metro tell the story of why Transit is so important for the region, despite whether you use it or not. The site shares the stories of seven Metro users to demonstrate that a vital public transit system is critical for the region’s economic well-being. For this site, we designed and directed the site and animation, as well as photographed all of the riders and locations. In addition, we produced the three videos featured on the site, one featured below.

Launch I’m On Board with Metro

And hey that looks like our own Becky Voboril in this video!

Special thanks to our friends at Driftlab for working with us on the development, as well as Hired Gun & 90 Degrees West for their expertise in filming and editing the videos.

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Interactive, Photography, Strategy, Video

April 2010

New TOKY Web Site

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.

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Announcements, Development, Featured, How We Work, Inside the Studio, Interactive, People

April 2010

Webby Honoree: Interactive Design for the Arts

For the fifth consecutive year, TOKY’s interactive work has been awarded a Webby honoree. In each of the previous 4 years, TOKY has been awarded for work in the Arts category. This year the results are in, and the site for Ideal (dis-)Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer has received honors. Out of the nearly 10,000 entries submitted to the 14th Annual Webby Awards, less than 15% are awarded the status of Official Honorees.

For more information on the site:
View the original post or visit: oldmasters.pulitzerarts.org

Jay David

Posted by Jay David
Awards + Press, Featured, Interactive

February 2010

TOKY’s Pulitzer Foundation Websites Published in AIGA National Review

We got a look at the new Design Review from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), and we’re proud to see our “Dan Flavin” and “Light Project” websites for The Pulitzer Foundation looking so good. The AIGA Design Review is one of the top awards in the design profession, and we’re humbled and honored to be the only St. Louis area firm included this year.

Winning this award means the Pulitzer sites will become part of the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum, where the AIGA Archives are housed. It will join several other AIGA winners the TOKY team has, going all the way back to 1990. Search the AIGA Archives online here.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Awards + Press, 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, Interactive, MYOS

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