Feast Magazine | TOKY Branding + Design

Posts Tagged feast magazine

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

Kirsten O'Loughlin

Posted by Kirsten O'Loughlin
Announcements, Featured, How We Work, Interactive

July 2010

TOKY Designs FEAST Magazine: “Tablescapes”

All this week we’re taking a look at the art direction and design TOKY did for St. Louis’ new FEAST Magazine. Our “Tablescapes” concept was a fantastical cityscape made of crockery, populated with miniature people to make it appear larger than life — and tongue in cheek.

After Feast staff shopped for 60+ products from six stores (OK, seven including the mini people), we got the shot list down to 41 unique shots. Photographer Ashley Gieseking then shot over 500 images to get the final 30 raw files needed. All of the photography was done in TOKY’s in-house photo studio, all in one loooong day. After the initial retouching and image clipping, we spent the next two days stitching it together in a massive retouching marathon, and we had three shots for the spreads above. Whew! Thank goodness it didn’t get changed after we turned it over to the editors.

Special shout outs to Ashley for her dedication and patience!

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Awards + Press, Featured, Inside the Studio, Photography

July 2010

FEAST Magazine: TOKY, Lee do the White Barn

This week we’re celebrating the launch of FEAST Magazine, the new publication from the suddenly very profitable Lee Enterprises. For the last three and a half months, the TOKY team has been eating and drinking FEAST layouts, all in secret as the mag prepared its launch.

Above are a couple of spreads from the 8-page White Barn feature story we designed around Tuan Lee’s wonderful photo essay (we also did the logo, grid system, all look and feel, many of the section story designs and the website design and CSS… but more on that later…). The White Barn is a cult destination for foodies and junk food aficionados in St. Louis. It’s the heart and soul of a 75 year old fireball named Rich Robson, who says “I love the people, and I love to work — and I like to flirt with the ladies.”

Our spreads have been pretty much unchanged from our final turn-over files to printed pieces. The only real changes we noted are that all the captions have mysteriously vanished, leaving empty little undesigned white pockets of space. Ah, well… I’m certain Roger Black has disappointments, too.

By the way, at FEAST’s debut party we spotted Mr. Robson standing quietly in a corner, and Katy and Liz from our team asked him for a photo. He’s kind of a hero around TOKY. He still loves the ladies. Looks like the ladies love him back.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Branding + Design, Featured

July 2010

Feast Magazine Debuts, Designed by TOKY

We attended the debut launch party of Catherine Neville’s new FEAST Magazine last night, and finally got our hands on a copy of the real thing.

After 100 days of immersing ourselves in the design of everything FEAST — from the new logo to the grid structure to the look and feel of the publication to the CMS-driven web site design — as well as final design of the magazine’s two main feature stories — it was nice to see the first issue printed and looking, well… pretty OK.

There were a lot of changes that we noticed in the magazine from our original files, but that’s to be expected as magazine designers turn over templates to internal art directors (kudos to Lisa Triefenbach, the magazine’s new AD, for getting this issue to the finish line!).

So we’re going to make this week a full-on feast of “FEAST” on our blog. We think this will be a nice way to present the reality of how designs can change from the designer’s hands to final execution, and to celebrate the arrival of a long-expected labor of love for Katy, Liz, Kirsten, and Becky on our team.

Today, a before and after of the first issue’s cover. The TOKY team designed this WEEKS ago (and were asked to keep the subject on the hush-hush) and finally saw the printed copies for the first time last night. The changes that we noted are subtle but interesting for students of design: the red FEAST logo has gone yellow and lost it’s shading behind Tuan Lee’s monumental burger, our more understated white type headline has been boxed in honkin’ white bars, and the lack of yellow highlights in the above-the-logo teasers. Otherwise… pretty much what we designed.

Tomorrow: the White Barn Burgers feature story — before and after.

Eric Thoelke

Posted by Eric Thoelke
Announcements, Branding + Design, Design Semiotics, Featured