Posts Tagged branding

November 2011

New Work: Launching the Baileys’ Range Brand

Prominent St. Louis restaurateur Dave Bailey has opened four restaurants, and TOKY has been proud to craft — and sustain — the identity for each one: Baileys’ Chocolate Bar; Rooster; Bridge; and now Baileys’ Range, a bustling burgers-and-shakes spot at the corner of 10th and Olive in downtown St. Louis.

The restaurant’s name has a few different meanings — the range of options on the menu, yes, but also the open natural landscape, the range out on the farm. (All the beef here is grass-fed, free range, and local.) We knew, though, that we wanted to steer clear of all the cliches that can zap the joy out of those very meanings. No Western type. No longhorns.

What we created matches the place: fun, rich with texture, totally unique. From the identity to the menus and signage, we sought to create an authentic, warm, and cheerful vibe for a place you’d be happy to come with your family, have drinks with your friends (hope you have a lot of friends; there are TONS of interesting grown up drink options), or end the evening with a freshly made shake.

The TOKY team greatly enjoyed partnering with Scott Pondrom of Design Deli to create the illustrations you see below in the print, signage, and website work.

The menus need to be easily interchangeable — there’s a new Burger Battle every week!

Toky baileysrange exterior

Outdoor signage, with a chalkboard that staff can update daily

Toky baileysrange wallsign

Exterior signage

Toky baileysrange long table

Bar on the right, loooooong table at center, companion artwork on the far wall. The great interior work was led by Brynne Rinderknecht.

Toky baileysrange website

The soft-opening iteration of the website, www.baileysrange.com

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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

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April 2009

Graphis Branding USA 3

We have 8 pages in the recently released Graphis Branding USA 3 publication, a showcase for the nation’s leading branding and design firms. A few samples follow below, or download all of the pages as a pdf.

TOKY Graphis Branding 3

TOKY Graphis Branding 3

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January 2009

Our Work Represented in Six Recent Graphis Design Annuals

graphis

Graphis Design Annual 2008
The Private Residences at The Chase Park Plaza

Graphis Branding 5
Identity and marketing for downtown St. Louis’ Mercantile Exchange district

Graphis Brochures 6
Season ticket brochure for Opera Theatre
Also contains quote from Eric Thoelke on back cover

Graphis Posters 2007
Two Opera Theatre Posters

Graphis Logo Design 7
Opera Theatre
Downtown St. Louis’ Mercantile Exchange

Graphis Letterhead 7
Hill Investment Group Business Papers

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January 2009

Branding St. Louis!

We’ve just heard that the Metro Board of Directors has finally awarded the contract for all the promotion, advertising and branding for the Arch, the Arch Museum and all the other properties (Old Courthouse, Old Cathedral, Helicopter Rides, and Riverfront) to the team of TOKY and Standing Partnership.

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