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 Arts “Web 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.