The TOKY staff is licking its chops, remote in hand, for this season’s “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” which kicks off Friday April 13 on PBS. Among the featured artists this time around: Marina Abramovic, Ai Weiwei, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mangold, and Catherine Opie. Stellar line-up. For a creative firm so tied to museum work (not to mention packed with artists), this will be exciting spring viewing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Animation: Don Lavender

We’ve just posted our fourth full-length video of “Design Legends of St. Louis”, a video portrait of Designer Stan Gellman. View all Design Legends

View more at: STLdesignlegends.com

We’ve just posted our second full-length video of “Design Legends of St. Louis”, a video portrait of Bob Falk.

Most people know Bob from Falk-Harrison, now helmed by his sons, Jon and Matt, and their partner Steve Harrison. Bob has had a long, successful – and fascinating career.

He shares some great stories – from his college days at Washington University, working up the nerve to ask the great Ivan Chermayeff to look at his portfolio, projecting images onto the Old Post Office during an all-nighter with his design buds at Obata, to being hired by Chip Reay at HOK, to how he decided to start his own company.

We’ll be posting the next “Design Legends” Profile, on Frank Roth, in mid-June. Please let us know how you like these, and share them with your friends!

We’ve posted the first of our full-length videos of “Design Legends of St. Louis”, a video portrait of Dick Juenger.

Dick is one of the nicest, most decent guys around, and here talks about his history at Gardner Advertising in the 40′s and 50′s, his co-founding of Obata Studios in the 60′s, and his freelance business in the 70′s and 80′s. His beautiful hand-lettering for Budweiser’s calligraphic labels is still gorgeous after all these years.

I met Dick when I had just graduated from college, and was shopping my oh-so Swiss-inspired portfolio around. I showed up at Dick’s downtown studio, surrounded by his delicate calligraphy and hand-lettering. Dick was encouraging and enthusiastic, while gently guiding me to excise some of my more egregious typographic experiments and all of my then-precious Man Ray inspired photograms (clones, more accurately). I left his office feeling better about myself and better about my portfolio than when I had gone in.

Four years later (1984 or so) I designed a logo for HealthLink Corporation — a logo which, astoundingly, is still in use today — and I used Dick’s typeface “Jana” as basis for the logotype font. Then, around ten years ago I was gratified to see that Doyald Young had included Jana in his masterful “Logotypes & Letterforms” book.

Jana is a font that still has strong associations of a certain time and culture. One of my favorite uses is in “The Divorcee” movie poster. The copy alone is tasteless — and priceless. Never has such a great typeface by such a gentleman been used to shill so base a product.

We’ll be posting the next “Design Legends” profile, this one on Bob Falk, on June 3. Frank Roth’s profile will follow in mid-June.  Please let us know how you like these, and share with your friends and associates.

This well-made video from Greg Kiger’s Once Films explores the independent voices that make the food scene in St. Louis so rich and distinctive.

Featuring our friend and client Dan Kopman of the St. Louis Brewery (makers of Schlafly Beer), Gerald Craft of Niche, Kevin Nashan of Sidney Steet Café, all singing the praises of Alison Mace’s Sauce Magazine. Her magazine and these people are why we have four 2011 James Beard finalists in St. Louis, – three Best Chef nods (including Craft and Nashan) and an “Outstanding Wine Service” for our friend Glenn Bardgett from Annie Gunn’s.

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.

Our “Carrole’s Story” video for Dr. Barry Singer has been shouted out as one of four “Can’t Miss Clicks” by healthcare firm GSW Worldwide. They rave “How many healthcare websites have you visited with patient testimonials? 50? 100? And, how many of those have felt real and human to you (vs. edited within an inch of their lives)? I’m guessing it’s a pretty tiny number. MSLivingWell is one website that really held the line – the stories there are delivered in a truly creative way and are so real and honest that you get caught up in them.”

Thanks for the props, GSW!

Launch I’m On Board with Metro

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

TOKY work has been nominated for 16 Addys in this year’s Ad Club of St. Louis “best of” review.

For us, the cool part is that we were nominated in so many different categories, for doing so many different kinds of things: web sites, print brochures, brand identity, photography, high-end invitations and holiday cards, posters and video storytelling.

Here’s a list of our nominations: