Archive for the Strategy Category

July 2011

TOKY Welcomes Stephen Schenkenberg as Senior Strategist

TOKY welcomes Stephen Schenkenberg to the team! Stephen is an accomplished communications strategist, writer, and editor with 15 years of experience working across media. He joins TOKY as Senior Strategist, with emphasis on Content Strategy and Brand Strategy.

Before joining TOKY, Stephen ran his own Schenkenberg Studio, with a client list that included architect Rocio Romero, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and Claremont McKenna College. Stephen also spent more than three years as the Editor-in-Chief of St. Louis Magazine and Stlmag.com, helping oversee the redesign and relaunch of those publications. During his tenure, Stephen helped earn the print publication two National City & Regional Magazine Awards and introduced a suite of subject-specific blogs and a monthly podcast series, which he hosted.

Stephen earned a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Northwestern University and attended the international Stanford Professional Publishing Course. His 15-year career has spanned journalism and organizational communications, traditional print and modern online publishing, with a consistent focus on the arts and not-for-profit sectors. Additional clients have included Washington University in St. Louis, New York University, the Center of Creative Arts (COCA), The Believer, The Quarterly Conversation, and Wisconsin Historical Society Press, for whom he edited three books.

Among Stephen’s side projects is curating ReadingGass.org, a website he launched in 2007 to explore the work of decorated literary figure William H. Gass. Stephen now spends part of his weekends editing the definitive collection of interviews conducted with Gass over the past four decades.

Stephen and his wife, Tamara, lived for part of 2010 and 2011 in Berlin, but they have resettled in St. Louis, where he was born and raised. They love just about anything connected to food, wine, and the arts.

Welcome, Stephen!

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March 2011

Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis Site a “Communication Arts” Site of the Week

We’re very happy that the new site we designed and developed for CAM has been chosen as a Communication ArtsWeb Pick of the Week“.

Every day Communication Arts does a fantastic job selecting a Web Pick of the Day, but it’s always nice when the judges select one of those for special recognition and a more in-depth feature. This is our second Web Pick of the Week from CA (the other here), and we’ve had several CA Web Picks of the Day (here, here, and here).

The site for CAM, now only two months old, was a key part of a total rebranding by TOKY. Look for an in-depth case study on all of the CAM rebranding work, to be featured on this site soon.

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is known for its ever-changing programming and deep community outreach. Exhibits in the main galleries rotate every three months, biweekly mini-shows cycle through its energetic Front Room, and a parade of social events and fundraisers take place every month. Despite this, the Contemporary felt it wasn’t doing enough to present its art and artists in a way that would attract a public beyond die-hard art lovers. They asked TOKY to help broaden their appeal to the general public, take the trepidation out of a trip to see contemporary art, and help the Contemporary become a must-go social destination.

In addition to the site design, TOKY rebranded the museum by its acronym CAM, created a new brand identity, developed a new graphic language and external personality, and began the process of uniting print, advertising, web, and social media strategies.

Read more about the site on the Communication Arts site. Below is an overview of some of the key pages of the site.

Built on Eero, TOKY’s propriety Content Management System, the homepage slideshow automatically pulls the latest events, latest exhibitions and programs onto the home page. Now CAM can update virtually all content on the site easily, and without digging into the code or creating custom graphic assets. Because CAM’s new site is so event focused, it was crucial to hone the workflows so that content entry could be done in one place, and feed out to the areas it needs to appear — and, more importantly, update and archive automatically, eliminating much of the legwork which the previous site had forced on CAM’s staff.

One of the more robust features of the site is the new Calendar. Now CAM can easily feature, categorize, share, and archive events, all while using the site to show more faces of the community and images of events past.

With two galleries which consistently showcase emerging artists, CAM needed a tool to promote and manage ongoing exhibitions. Additionally, the new CAM site can now archive all past exhibitions; they are currently archiving exhibitions from years when CAM was called the Forum for Contemporary Art.

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January 2011

Welcome to CAM: A New Brand for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis


We’ve been working behind the scenes for the past six months or so to help polish up one of St. Louis’ great cultural assets: the Contemporary Art Museum. The Contemporary team expressed that their brand, as expressed in logo, website, collateral, and even building, had “gone gray”. It felt, they said, too boring, too quiet, too aloof when they wanted to feel engaged with the public, spirited, bright and new.

We realized that the old logo was part of the challenge — a single line of elegantly letter-spaced Univers set without breaks. And it’s sandblasted into the concrete exterior of the building and windows, so it’s going to be an essential part of the Museum for decades to come… no rebranding can ever move forward without acknowledging this original logo in some way.

We broke that logo into a more readable, more usable stack of words, setting them left and right off of a common vertical axis. We also did research and found that only two other museums of contemporary art went by the CAM abbreviation, and neither was geographically proximate. A new consumer-friendly appellation and logo were soon born, now riding on top of that stack of words (see the black tote bag in the image above).

Since then we’ve reimagined the newsletter (top left), posters, mailers, exterior and interior signage, branded merchandise, and built a completely new content-managed website on our proprietary Eero™ CMS. The site went live 1-11-11, and the rest is rolling out this week in advance of the Museum’s opening this Friday night. Come celebrate the new brand with us at CAM!

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December 2010

Case Studies in “Brand Identity Essentials”

TOKY work has been included in “Brand Identity Essentials: 100 Principles for Designing Logos and Building Brands”. The book outlines 100 key steps to creating world-class brands. We’re pleased that so much of our work has been used in their case studies.

Butler’s Pantry and Pappy’s Smokehouse logos, illustrating principle 1: “Illustrative Logos”
Rooster Café logo, illustrating principle 13: “Logo Shapes”
Art The Vote, illustrating principle 27: “Brand Stories”
Smokehouse Market packaging, illustrating principle 29: “Program Consistency”
Mercantile Exchange District logo, illustrating principle 61: “Trademarks”
Bissinger’s Confections packaging, illustrating principle 82: “The Truth Comes Out”
Rooster and MX, illustrating principle 95: “Connecting the Dots”

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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

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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.

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