As the firm behind every one of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts‘ exhibition catalogues to date, we were pleased by this tweet from well-known visual arts journalist and critic Tyler Green. The Pulitzer has been a wonderful partner. Thanks, Tyler!

Though we were sad to see longtime Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Director Paul Ha make the move from St. Louis to Cambridge, we’re looking forward to helping celebrate his legacy this Saturday at the CAM Gala at the Four Seasons.

TOKY is proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the CAM Gala, and we’re eager for the design work we’ve done for it to get in the hands of so many supporters of the institution.

Next week, we’ll post a few photos from the evening (though the dance floor’s off limits) and provide a more detailed look at the full collateral we designed.

Cheers, Paul! Consider this an an early toast for contributing so much to St. Louis’ cultural landscape.

In January, TOKY launched the web catalogue for Reflections of the Buddha, the current exhibition at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Yesterday, we launched a companion site for “Staging Reflections of the Buddha,” an innovative project that “unites theater, visual arts, and social work to build connections between the art and all audiences while transforming lives and fostering connections between communities.” It’s a highly original program — built on a partnership between the Pulitzer, Prison Performing Arts, St. Patrick Center, and Employment Connection — with free events and performances happening through March. TOKY built the site using WordPress, helping the Pulitzer offer an integrated event calendar that offers, for the first time, seamless ticket reservations through Eventbrite.

The Graphis Poster Annual 2012 winners have been announced, and TOKY’s poster for “Staging Old Masters: Former Prisoners Perform at the Pulitzer” (above right) — the innovative theatre/community program at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts — has been given the Gold. This is a tough, international competition, and we’re thrilled with the recognition — especially since TOKY was responsible not just for the design but for the original photography on this project as well.

Here’s a bit about the book:

Graphis Poster Annual 2012 features some of the most visually compelling posters from the past year chosen from thousands of international entries, including Platinum award-winning entries from Thomas Wedell and Nancy Skolos, Paul Garbett, Hei Yiyang, Carlo Fiore, Kasai Noriyuki, Andrea Castelletti, Guy Mastrion, Fritz Klaetke and Mike Barker. The 185 posters selected for this volume clearly demonstrate the potency of this medium. This year’s edition also includes a revealing interview with Stephan Bundi, an accomplished professional art director and designer who is internationally renowned for his poster work.

You can pick up the new book at the Graphis Store. Congrats to all the winners!

Here’s a look at the TOKY work that’s being recognized this year:

1. “Texts in the City” Invitation, St. Louis Public Library Foundation (related blog post)

•

2. Contemporary Fund Mailer, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

•

3. “Share the Season” Packaging, Panera Bread (related blog post)

•

4. stylus box/catalogue, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

•

5. Grab grassy this moment your I’s catalogue, Laumeier Sculpture Park (related blog post)

•

6. 2011 Season Poster, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

•

7. Dreamscapes website, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

•

Click here to view the embedded video.

8. “Design Legends of St. Louis“ Video Series, AIGA St. Louis (one of five videos is shown above)

•

9. “Return to Summer” In-Store, Panera Bread (related gallery at Facebook)

•

10. “Share the Season” In-Store, Panera Bread (related blog post)

•

11. “A Tasteful Affair” Invitation, Food Outreach

•

Our thanks to the ADDY judges who have recognized this work! We’re looking forward to celebrating St. Louis creativity with our colleagues at the February ceremony.

For the fourth year in a row, TOKY has provided the design work for marketing Mardi Gras St. Louis, a series of a dozen major events celebrated for six weeks during January and February. It’s one of the most exciting national Mardi Gras celebrations outside of New Orleans itself. While this year’s identity is completely new, we’ve continued last year’s efforts at communicating that Mardi Gras St. Louis is much more than the massively attended Grand Parade. From the Cajun Cook-Off to the Wiener Dog Derby, the series is packed with events for all types of audiences. Find out more above, and at the website, designed and developed by TOKY.

Last week, I had the opportunity to give a presentation — “InDesign CS5 Tips & Techniques” — for the Society for Marketing Professional Services St. Louis (SMPS ). My talk featured examples of ways to be more efficient in the leading desktop publishing application, and how to do better work faster. I spoke about creating documents, using images, handling text effectively, using color, and saving, exporting and printing files.

There were about 30 people in attendance, ranging in age and, from what I could tell, experience with InDesign. (Also, geography: one gentleman drove all the way in from Columbia, Mo.!) My thanks to those who attended and the SMPS team, who provided a large pre-talk breakfast buffet for all and gifted a nifty little bamboo thumb drive to me.

You’re welcome to view a video of the seminar above or on Vimeo’s website.

As the half-empty coach bus came to a halt in the cold pre-dawn, I alighted — sans map, sans coat, sans shave, sans food. Dunedin, New Zealand: I don’t know anything about you. I beelined for a cluster of steeples, hellbent for a flat white and an egg sandwich. Luckily, I found both, along with a healthy dose of contemporary art, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Dunedin’s historic train station

Located upon the Octagon — the city’s forcefully named centre — the gallery is the oldest of its kind in New Zealand. Following a delightful and much-needed breakfast at the adjacent Nova Café, I checked my backpack at the front desk and wondered upstairs into Pieter Hugo: Nollywood. The exhibition caught me by surprise. How often does one travel to New Zealand in search of surreal and striking portraits of Nigerian film stereotypes?

They say Nigeria’s Nollywood is the world’s third largest film industry. It releases up to a thousand titles a year onto the local home-video market. Such productivity is only possible because the movies are made in conditions that would make western filmmakers cringe. Produced and marketed in the space of a week, they use cheap equipment, basic scripts, actors cast the day of shooting, and real locations. While drawing on genres and typologies drawn from Hollywood, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of mass-media self-representation. The stories — including tales of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, and prostitution — speak to the experiences and values of their local audiences. The narratives are overdramatic, and deprived of happy endings. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.

South African photographer Pieter Hugo became intrigued by Nollywood’s fictional worlds, where the everyday and the unreal intertwine. He asked a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets and photographed them. The resulting images recreate the stereotypical characters that typify Nollywood productions, including mummies, satanic demons, and zombies, all casually posed in the backlots of Enugu.

— From the Dunedin Public Art Gallery

I’m no art critic (and am mostly going off the few notes I took while at the exhibit), but the strange characters of Nollywood appear all the more real because of the informal portrait format. The lines between Nigeria and the Bizarro Nigeria that is Nollywood become a little less defined.

Partitioned by a glass wall in a corner of the downstairs lobby is a viewing area for New Zealand films and documentaries, where I took in a documentary on the kiwi band The Chills and a few shorter pieces on Maori civil rights issues. It was a lovely way to learn more about some of the country’s less visible history.

A few days later, while wondering around town, I came across a building on the campus of the University of Otago sporting a sign for the Masters of Design program. Chancing a peek through the window, I spotted a navy blue Cardinals cap and knew I was in good company. The wearer was a design student named Josh Jeffreys (who is not from St. Louis — he just liked the hat). He graciously showed me around their space and later introduced me to some undergrad designers in the final day of their thesis projects — a situation from which I was not far removed. Josh explained some of the problems the masters students were tackling. It should come as no surprise that an island nation would have a heightened awareness of global warming and its symptoms (e.g., rising sea levels). As such, many solutions involved finding ways to live more sustainably. In one case, that meant sturdy food packaging that encourages reuse and discourages the purchase of additional containers. In another, it meant finding ways to reduce the amount of waste from Air New Zealand one flight to the next. Remarkable stuff for a program in its first year.

Studio space for the University of Otago’s Masters of Design program

Shortly afterwards I was on a bus headed north along the east coast. I stayed overnight in Christchurch on a day in which they had the largest aftershocks since the February 22nd quake. With the downtown closed, much of the city on lockdown, and no water at the hostel, I thought it best to leave. Several hours later I was on a ferry coming to port in Wellington on the north island.

Wharewaka o Poneke — a recently opened waka house along the Wellington bay

I think of Wellington as New Zealand’s San Francisco: beautiful bayside location, historic trolley cars, and straddling multiple fault lines. Upon arrival I ventured over to City Gallery Wellington, where I explored Tender is the Night, a group exhibition that “brings together a selection of art works which explore the complex and intense nature of desire, love, and the loss of a loved one.” It was a large and varied show, spanning multiple galleries and floors, but the work was strong throughout. Ancient shunga prints, Jesper Just’s haunting A Vicious Undertow, and Liz Maw’s Robert Plant — a hyper-sexualized giant pink visage of the Led Zepplin frontman (immortalized on a postcard sent back to the TOKY offices) — somehow all work together.

While bopping around the south island, I was fortunate enough to get in contact with one of my absolute favorite typographers, Kris Sowersby. Mr. Sowersby works under the Klim Type Foundry moniker, and had just released the beautiful pair of Metric & Calibre. It is nearly impossible to spend a day in any New Zealand town without seeing something of his, whether it’s Serrano plastered all over BNZ locations, shopping tags emblazoned with the Rodd & Gunn logo, or even something as simple as the window numbers for an apartment building. Readers of The Daily will recognize his Founders Grotesk, FF Unit Slab, and Tiempos. (My personal favorites are cheeky National and curvaceous Feijoa.) I met Kris (and his awesome dog) at the Peoples Coffee just off of Cuba Street, for a flat white and an hour or so of type geekery. With the exception of a few brief encounters as a student with WashU alum Ben Kiel, I had never really discussed typography with a real typographer. Kris showed up with a boxing-induced bruise around his eye, and we proceeded to discuss his design process, life as a self-taught typographer, font theft, Berlin, “crap newspaper design,” New Zealand’s design culture, the state of Web typography, Melbourne coffee shops, hunting, New Zealand craft brews, rare type specimens, and everything in between.

One rainy day spent in the Wellington City Library I read chef René Redzepi’s NOMA (published by Phaidon, no less). In it, Redzepi describes an inspirational journey of discovery he took throughout Scandinavia and its many islands to meet the farmers and fisherman who supplied his award-winning Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. These interactions caused Redzepi to change to focus of his restaurant, and set it on the course that would eventually earn it the distinction of World’s Best Restaurant for two years running. While in no way do I presume to be the design world’s René Redzepi, I did find the experience of talking with Kris Sowersby to be quite enlightening. Great ingredients transform a mundane dish into a great one, and similarly, great typefaces can (and often do) anchor entire brands. Whenever possible, we designers should make an effort to know the other designers who provide the foundation for much of our work.

We wrote recently about the highly regarded photography collection of TOKY Director of New Business John Foster — it’s been covered in Art & Antiques and Newsweek, among other publications. Today, the fine folks at Phaidon — they make gorgeous books about subjects we love — wrote about John’s collection in their Agenda publication. Click through for the interview and 15-image slideshow of photographs. Congrats, John!

The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970 by Robert Smithson. It’s located in the remote Rozel Bay on the north arm of Great Salt Lake in Utah. Even though this is one of the most unique works of art I’ve ever seen, I primarily remember it because of the adventure it was just to get there.

In 2006, my wife (girlfriend at the time), Rachel, and I took a trip out west. We love National Parks, and always manage to base our vacations around them. This vacation was no different, with an itinerary that featured Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, and a drive through the Grand Tetons.

With some convincing on Rachel’s part, we added one more park to the list: Golden Spike National Historic Site. To be clear, though, her primary objective was to see the Spiral Jetty.

After leaving Jackson, Wyoming, we took Highway 89 south through the beautiful Bridger National Forest, passed through Logan, Utah, and made it to Brigham City, where we stayed in a classy 20-room Howard Johnson’s, one of the few hotels in the area.

We woke up early the next day and started our pilgrimage. After about an hour driving through a desolate, arid landscape, we finally arrived at Golden Spike; the temperature was already in the upper 80′s. At this point we had not seen a single sign for the Jetty. The only reason we knew we had 15 more miles was thanks to the Dia Foundation’s somewhat comedic directions (“Immediately you cross a cattle guard. Call this cattle guard #1”; “If you choose to continue…”).

Even with Dia’s instructions, we weren’t sure if we were going in the right direction. Every fork or cattle fence made us stop and question if we missed a turn. Thankfully, there was one sign that let us know we were not on the right path.

As we got closer, I started to feel as though we had driven to another planet. In the distance I could see the lake, which was blood-red. It’s color is “due to the presence of salt-tolerant bacteria and algae that thrive in the extreme 27 percent salinity” (Wikipedia). The land around the lake was extremely arid and covered with large volcanic basalt rocks and the occasional rusted shell of an automobile.

The road came to a stop, and we went on foot down the only trail we could find. After about a mile we came to the Jetty. At the time of our 2006 visit, the water was high and the tops of the rocks were barely sticking out over the red water. Stopping on a hill, I had one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had. The Jetty was in front of me, abandoned oil drills in the distance, dried salt beds to the east and volcanic rock behind me. I felt as though I stumbled into Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. Aside from Rachel, it seemed as if no other person existed.

The website for the artwork explains how it was built: “Using black basalt rocks and earth from the site, the artist created a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that stretches out counterclockwise into the translucent red water.” While the rocks were originally black, due to the salt, they are now primarily white.

It’s worth noting that the Jetty is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet. Since the Jetty was built during a drought, it was submerged for three decades until 2004, when it was exposed for almost an entire year.

After walking out as far as we could on the rocks, we meandered a little east of the Jetty to some dry salt beds. The Great Salt Lake has a history of oil drilling, and this area felt like a graveyard for it. The horizon was decorated with abandoned oil rigs while the foreground was scattered with rusted-out oil drums.

To be honest, I hadn’t been very excited about this part of our trip. The Jetty looked interesting in photos, but I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the two days of my precious vacation time. However, after being there, I can honestly say it was one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had.

If you find yourself a day or two drive from Utah, I highly encourage a visit. You won’t forget it.

An endnote: In 2011, the Dia Art Foundation’s lease on Spiral Jetty expired, and the state of Utah took it over. There were many fears over the future of the Jetty, including threats of oil drilling nearby. But just last week, the Dia Foundation announced that it has successfully reacquired the lease from the state, for at least the next 10 years.