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

“DART St. Louis is a participatory photography challenge that started with one basic premise – that beauty can be found anywhere by those who seek it. In April 2011 over 250 creative St Louisans threw darts at a huge map of St Louis City. Over the following month, participants visited the area where their dart landed and made a photograph. The resulting collection of photographs show a snapshot of St. Louis as it is today, one random block at a time.”

TOKY designed the logo, the website, helped promote the event, and a couple of us even participated by throwing a dart and shooting the results (seen below). It was an incredible event (a big thanks to Curt von Diest for organizing and managing the event!) that raised a considerable amount of money for Rebuilding Together St. Louis.

Check out the new website for the event at: http://2011.dartstlouis.com

Eric Thoelke’s shot from Cherokee & Michigan

My shot from N. Grand & Page

Jane Winburn’s shot from Euclid and Buckingham Ct.

Jane Nagle’s shot from Boyle and Vandeventer.

Karen Tabaka’s shot from Cote Brilliante & Prarie.

Karen, Katy and Jane working the registration desk at the DART throw event.

The cover story in the Post-Dispatch’s GO! section last week was “The Arts, At Your Fingertips”. They looked at 11 local cultural institutions’ interactive and social media presence. The article was flattering to CAM and the site, quoting Alex Elmestad, CAM’s new media manager: “The whole idea is to make the museum more accessible, more user-friendly…Instead of inundating people with pieces of paper, we want to give them interactive tools to make that information really come alive.”

About the site, they wrote ”A newly designed site by local company TOKY provides clean navigation and includes a cool feature that lets users type in a five-word comment that gets posted almost immediately to a blog and on the homepage.” Glad they like the “Why I Love CAM in 5 Words” feature! One never knows what will catch on.

Communication Arts is one of the world’s top publications about and for the design profession. Every day, CommArts chooses a single website that, in their view features the best of current design. On January 18, the Site of the Day will be “stylus: a project by ann hamilton”, which TOKY created for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. We worked very closely with both Pulitzer staff and Ms. Hamilton on the site, which uses extensive video, sound, and viewer participation to explore the concepts of community within the Pulitzer show.

TOKY and long-time client HOK launched the newest in a long line of projects last week — and this one’s been a long time coming. We started conceptual work on the HOK History & Lore site way back in 2007. Since then the TOKY team has been working with HOK’s great archivists, writers, technologists, and project managers to build a comprehensive timeline of their major projects, people and events. Even cooler, the site encourages others to add their memories to the timeline through interactive tools.

Is it just a coincidence that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey grew up in a city that embraces Message Bridges?

Give us a pedestrian overpass and a stack of SOLO plastic cups and we’ll find a short message to shout out to thousands.

I know of two bridges in St. Louis that have been adopted by the public in this way; one on Highway 55 near Bayless Avenue, and one of 44 west of Elm Avenue.

But why these two bridges, and not others? There are at least three other pedestrian bridges that span highway 55 north of the Message Bridge. What about the people in the neighborhoods surrounding this bridge determined that it was special? Why is this bridge always covered with messages of love and longing, but other bridges go silent? Why does someone heart Bob so much that they become bridge-worthy, but another Bob up the highway doesn’t make the cut? How did these people determine individually that these events (“Kelly is 16″) were meritorious of SOLO cups, but not permanent tagging?

In the end, Message Bridges are a polite form of graffiti, leaving no damage and providing cups to be recycled into new messages. They disappear as quickly and cleanly as any digital medium.

I want to find others in cities across the country. Is there another name for these? Anyone already talking about them? Send me an image and a map if you know of one. We’ll post them as we get them.

Life at HOK (hoklife.com) was launched last October — with no promotional advertising — to show the world the people behind the scenes at the design powerhouse, which had $752 million in 2008 revenue. Since then the slick medley of design and pop culture has won awards and become a frequent destination, not only for HOK’s 2,000-plus employees, but for potential hires, clients and competitors, said HOK communications specialist Jeannette Thompson.

“It has just been a great addition to our toolkit of ways we communicate both internally and externally,” Thompson said. “It’s really interesting how people are craving this kind of information.”

For more information on this project, please visit the following older related posts:
HOK Life featured in Architect Magazine
HOK Life on the A-List
HOK Life Video

Adding to the list of accolades comes recent inclusion in St. Louis Magazine’s A-List, for Best Company Blog.

Congratulations to HOK!
Click here for more information on HOKlife.com

In addition to designing HOK’s new brand, business papers and various web sites, TOKY recently worked with HOK to design, develop and launch their presence on various social networking tools. Most successfully and significantly was HOK’s effort in making the blog at HOKlife.com work.

More than just an entertaining peek inside an architecture firm’s offices, Life at Hok is a small revolution in corporate communication.

“The blog Life at HOK is important not so much for what it offers—tales from the HOK cubicle as well as snark-free design-related postings, travelogue, commentary, videos, and ephemera—as for what it represents: a blue-chip firm, the kind of outfit one would expect to tightly control all external communication, allowing more than two dozen of its younger staff to express themselves on company time. (Most of the contributors, located around the globe, are under 35.)”

by Braulio Agnese, Architecture Magazine

Read the full article at ArchitectMagazine.com
Visit HOKlife.com

As a kick-off event for the blog launch, all of the contributors were brought to St. Louis, given flip video cameras, and sent out in groups around town to interview each other and gather footage for some upcoming video spots. Here’s a small collection of some of the highlights from the day:

Click here to view the embedded video.