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.

We wrote recently about the highly regarded photography collection of TOKY Director of New Business John Foster — it’s been covered in Art & Antiques and Newsweek, among other publications. Today, the fine folks at Phaidon — they make gorgeous books about subjects we love — wrote about John’s collection in their Agenda publication. Click through for the interview and 15-image slideshow of photographs. Congrats, John!

On Twitter? So is some of Team TOKY. Subscribe to all of us at this special Twitter List or click through individual links below:

• TOKY → @tokybd
• Designer Logan Alexander → @LoganAlexander
• Senior Web Developer Tyler Craft → @tylerccraft
• Creative Director Jay David →@jdxpl
• Creative Director Katy Fischer → @katystl
• Interactive Designer Annette Gleason → @Annette_Gleason
• Designer Jane Nagle → @JaneNagle
• Senior Interactive Designer Kirsten O’Loughlin → @schtar
• Senior Strategist Stephen Schenkenberg → @Schenkenberg
• Creative Director Geoff Story → @GStufff

“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” — Jack Kerouac

#29.942566, New Orleans, LA. 2008, 2009 (More photos below)

Doug Rickard, the son of a retired preacher, grew up learning about America from a decidedly slanted point of view. His father, a Christian conservative who led a mega-church in the 80’s, was highly patriotic and proudly part of the “Moral Majority.” He taught his children that America was “the exception to the rest of the world” — that God had anointed our country as “special and unique.” This patriotic but misleading Reagan-era dogma may have been inspiring to most in the congregation, but young Doug, very much a rebel in his youth, had nagging doubts.

In spite of his troubled youth, Doug would graduate from high school. He then took a break of five years before attending college. In retrospect he sees the break as “one of the best things to occur,” as he could not have been “ready to learn” until that older age. It was through his studies in history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego (History major, graduating in 1994) that Rickard began to compare the greatness of our country with an unsettling truth: that America had a very dark past — a key being the enslavement of Africans to be a workforce for the American South. Deeper studies into the periods of segregation, “Jim Crow” laws, and the Civil Rights movement would impact him greatly.

Rickard, an artist as a child (his teachers would exclaim to his parents that he would surely “do something special” with his artistic talent), discovered photography in adulthood — a discovery that would become an obsession. He began to codify this obsession in early 2008, when he created the now highly popular websites American Suburb X and These Americans (parts of both sites could be considered NSFW, depending). These sites, largely extensions of his personal journey, obsessions, and self-education, are now highly regarded by photography aficionados, educators, and historians for their high quality of writing and massive visual archives. ASX receives approximately 80,000 unique visitors a month and is “Liked” by 38,000 Facebook fans. These Americans is known in part for being a view into Rickard’s personal found-image archive.

With such a strong interest in history, Rickard was used to looking at the past. But for these new web projects he turned his attention to the present, exploring the statistics, demographics, and socio-economics of contemporary America’s neglected communities. While doing this he began to experiment with ordinary static images resulting from keyword searches on Google. But by the next year — in mid-2009 — he discovered Google Street View.

In a telephone interview that lasted well over an hour, the 43-year-old-old Rickard told me that the idea for his recent photographic work emerged as a sort of “epiphany” within 24 hours of using Street View. The project was, he explained, the result of a sort of “perfect storm,” in that it combined his love of photography and its history with his background in American history and sociology. Also, practicality was a component in the form of his inability to travel America, a restriction of the scenarios in real life — a demanding day job and a young family.  According to Rickard, this epiphany fused immediately into a crystal-clear idea: He would use Street View as his camera and, working from a room in his home, travel the roads of neglected American cities and neighborhoods in a 21st-century “road trip.” This single idea would utterly consume his life for close to two years, resulting in the important body of work “A New American Picture,” a selection of which hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

When Google launched Street View in 2007, it was the company’s intent to map and document every street in the United States. Cars were dispatched into every city to drive every street and back road, using nine directional cameras mounted on the roofs of special cars. These cameras give us 360° movable views at a height of about 8.2 feet. There are also GPS units for positioning and three laser-range scanners designed for measuring up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle. Rickard analyzed tens or hundreds of thousands of Street Views in his search for perfect pictures, something he describes as containing an “apocalyptic-like brokenness.” Indeed, the height of the camera at 8.2 feet, while creating an aesthetic cohesion and uniformity of vision, adds a distinct feeling of “alienation” that Rickard employs. Unlike the making of street photos in the traditional sense, with Street View there is an obliviousness to the camera as it goes about its job with no feeling or emotion. In spite of this anonymity of machine, his images are layered with empathy.

Rickard has amassed several terabytes of Street View images — nearly 15,000 shots captured, labeled, and stored. From that massive stash, he selected only about 80 images for “A New American Picture.” To give you an idea of the voracity of Rickard’s Street View search, he has virtually explored almost every neighborhood in the “broken” portions of Atlanta, New Orleans, Jersey City, Durham, Houston, Watts (in Los Angeles), and Camden. He has also explored, inch by inch, the smaller towns of America with names like Lovington, Waco, Artesia, Dothan, and Macon. What he looks for are images that carry what he calls a certain “poetry” of subject matter, color, and story — a story described in part by him as “the inverse of the American Dream.” And if the image isn’t “perfect” according to the elements of Rickard’s demands, it’s a no-go. Everything has to be composed, via the camera motion of Street View, to his very subjective, personal, and exacting standards.

Rickard’s exhibition at MoMA opened last September and closes on January 16, 2012. The show is aptly entitled “New Photography 2011,” and includes the work of five other photographers: Moyra Davey, George Georgiou, Deana Lawson, Viviane Sassen, and Zhang Dali.

Doug Rickard is a modern-day photographer not unlike those who went before him. His imagery can be compared to the banal and mysterious cityscapes of painter Edward Hopper, or the great documentary photographers like Ben Shahn, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans, all of whom shone a light on the shadows and made known the “invisible” — the disenfranchised and forgotten communities of America. Just as WPA photographers like Dorothea Lange combed America to document the great American Depression, so has Doug Rickard with his new camera: Google Street View.

•

Note: The titles of the pictures below were carefully considered and contain three pieces of information. The first number is a Google code that contains geographical (possibly GPS) coordinates, but has been modified by Rickard so as to not disclose the exact Street View location. Second is the name of the city and state. Third are two dates, the first referring to the year the photograph was taken by Google Street View, the second referring to the year that Rickard made his picture. The overall title is meant to resemble an American street address and tie into location without specificity.

#34.546147, Helena-West Helena, AR. 2008, 2010

#39.259736, Baltimore, MD. 2008, 2011

#39.777110, Camden, NJ. 2009, 2010

#40.805716, Bronx, NY. 2009, 2011

#41.779976, Chicago, IL. 2007, 2011

#82.948842, Detroit, MI. 2009, 2010

#83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009, 2010

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning
Oil on canvas, 1930
Collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
Photography by Stephen Sloman

Walker Evans
Group Outside Movie Theater, From Moving Automobile
Macon, Georgia
Silver gelatin print
c. 1935

Walker Evans, A Street Scene
61st Street Between 1st and 3rd Avenues
New York, New York
Silver gelatin print
1938

This article was published simultaneously at Design Observer, where TOKY’s John Foster is a regular columnist.

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.

Multiple reports confirm: It was a really great day. In the nearly 10 hours spent at FK Studios in Midtown, more than 100 people were photographed, with everyone enjoying delicious food and treats generously donated by Baileys’ Restaurants, The Cup, and Wanderlust Pizza. Great cause, great camaraderie with others in the St. Louis design community.

Thanks to Jason Stoff for photographs three and four.

Over the past decade, John has earned wide recognition for his photography collection, with inclusion in Harper’s, Newsweek Online, and Art & Antiques itself, which named him one of the “Top 100 Collectors” in the U.S. His collection has toured U.S. museums, and his blog posts — both on his own Accidental Mysteries site and on Design Observer, where he’s a weekly contributor — have an international readership. All that to say: We know why John’s phone rang on that fall afternoon.

The nine-page finished article, Edward M. Gómez’s ”Snapshot Poetics,” includes interviews not only with John but also William Hunt, Robert Flynn Johnson, Robert Jackson, and Christian Schneeburger, all of whom are recognized as some of the most important collectors of this material in the world.

The photograph in the opening spread is owned by Christian Schneeberger. The three photos in the above spread are part of Foster’s collection.

A few of our favorite quotes from the piece:

The St. Louis-based vernacular photography collector John Foster, whose background is in graphic design, says of his habitual visits to flea markets: “I look for photos that are exceptional in their subject matter, point of view, conception and composition, and even with regard to technical aspects like tonality and focus. Maybe one out of every 500 images I see is worthy of a second, longer look, and it might take looking through that many before spotting a gem.”

…

The thrill of finding a fantastic anonymous photo has given rise to a lively, growing market, whose sources lie outside the established gallery world. Foster says, “To look for photos, I’ve always visited flea markets and antique shops, but today there’s eBay. I’ve spent countless hours and thousands of dollars on that website. There are others, too, where serious collectors will compete fiercely for a prized photo.”

Read the piece online, or — better yet — pick up a copy of the magazine at your local bookstore. The photos look terrific.

Late October in St. Louis was an incredible time. Yes, the Cardinals were making that unbelievable World Series run. But Team TOKY had another reason to celebrate — Eric Thoelke was honored as a Local Legend by AIGA St. Louis, his acceptance speech a PK Night-style flip through 15 years of TOKY history. It was a fantastic time.

Here’s a bit from the nomination write-up for Eric that was read that evening:

Today, with nearly 30 employees and a newly opened office in Washington, DC, TOKY Branding + Design is one of the most awarded creative shops in the Midwest focused on education, healthcare, culture, and nonprofits.Ericʼs commitment to using creative communications to improve St. Louis is part of the firmʼs DNA. TOKY provides high-level branding and identity work to local nonprofits and cultural institutions, including some of the most revered, at a discounted rate. In addition, Eric invests TOKYʼs staff time and financial resources into many St. Louis fundraisers, from FORM Design Week (Presenting Sponsor) to Food Outreachʼs A Tasteful Affair event (eight-year major sponsor). Eric not only mentors his staff professionally — especially young designers whose talent he spots — but he fosters an environment in which a large number of staff donate time or artwork to causes they themselves champion, from Foodstock to BicycleWORKS, PK Night to the St. Louis Arts Project.

Mary and Eric

TOKY sends its congratulations to longtime St. Louis-based designer Paul Bussman for his own 2011 Local Legend award, and we thank Kory Waschick for sharing these photos from the event.

Tucked away in the woods next to the protected Shawnee Forest was this extraordinary mid-century modern stone structure that fits perfectly into the hillsides. For a price, you can reserve this to yourself and call it your own as you explore the area.

“The House should therefore assume a natural place in the rocky Hillside site; It should provide a comfortable retreat for reading and writing in the midst of his thousand of books; it should make and appropriate setting for the social life the Duncans enjoyed, And it should include some Louis Sullivan artifacts as symbolic reminders of the sociological principles of architecture which Professor Duncan discerned in Sullivan’s works and writings…”
An excerpt from Inland Architect
Nov. 1971 (via http://brucegoff-castle-bandb.com/7901.html)

The home was originally designed and constructed for Hugh Duncan, a sociology professor at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. Duncan chose Bruce Goff, who was known for his unusual designs and for his portfolio of projects that varied in style. But most of all, he was chosen because of his previous work and study within the traditions of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

It’s an amazing destination, and even more amazing that you can spend several nights here milling around as if it’s your own.

A view of the residence from the trails that lead up above the property.

A view of the interior, primarily constructed of stone from the area. Goff also used many artifacts from demolished Louis Sullivan buildings in Chicago.

This is the view from inside the outdoor shower. What was originally a “mud room” is a stone circular building positioned to line up for views of specific rock formations nearby.

Before I left the property, the owner was kind enough to pull out the original drawings. It’s an amazing set of blueprints that covered every aspect of the building and helped me understand the original intentions of the building.

Here I am on the patio on the furthest side back of the property, wondering what all my fellow co-workers were doing right at this moment.

Bruce Goff statement:

“We desire to enter into and inhabit any great and original work of art — to possess it and allow it to possess us, be it literature, painting, music or architecture. This is why architecture is such a powerful art: we can inhabit it physically as well as spiritually in time and space. Someday perhaps it will, like music, become less earth-bound, more flexible and athletic, more ever-changing and free.”

Want to be a part of the largest food-collection bicycle ride in the country? Grab your bike and join us for Cranksgiving: THIS Sunday, November 6th, at 10 a.m. at Schlafly Bottleworks!

Now in its sixth year, Cranksgiving is hosted by BicycleWORKS, with proceeds going to our friends at Food Outreach. Riders can choose from a 5-, 10-, or 25-mile route, on which they’ll stop by several local grocery stores to pick up non-perishable food items to donate to the cause. Last year, more than 650 riders collected more than 6,000 food items, making it the largest Cranksgiving event in the country!

TOKY has long supported BicycleWORKS and their many fine projects. T-shirts for this year’s event are currently sold out, but you can still order yours online. You’ll be able to pick it up the week after the event at BWORKS. Once again, all proceeds from the sales go directly to Food Outreach.

For more information about Cranksgiving, visit bworks.org/bikeworks. We hope to see you there!