There’s not a bad seat in the house!

Brandon Lucas, Partner and Business Director

Made the trek down to Alpharetta/Atlanta a couple weekends ago to meet up with some old friends and visit a client venue of ours, Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park.

I’ve been to a lot of amphitheaters over the years (for business and pleasure) and to be quite honest I was expecting more of the same. And then I got there. My reaction was….THIS is what an outdoor amphitheatre should be and feel like.

The facility looks like a transformer coming out of the middle of the wilderness. Tree completely surround it once inside. It has a one-of-a-kind white, patchwork roof that works wonders in combination with the lighting during a show. There’s the old cliché comment every venue rattles off, “There’s not a bad seat in the house”, which is sometimes true and sometimes not…..in this case it’s 100% more than TRUE. 7,000 covered seats and 5,000 lawn. That’s only 12,000, perfect size! This place has hosted the Eagles, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Rush and on the day I was there Boston & Styx. So, not only is the place beautiful and unique, it’s an intimate place to see acts that generally perform at places much larger. And the most incredible part? There are real, living, towering trees on the lawn!

Driving home I had tons of ideas flowing through my head on how we can further help the ASO make the website that we built for them [see it: www.VZWAMP.com] as over-the-top as the venue itself. I was blown away!

The site is built on carbonhouse’s Venuelements system, tailored exclusively for major event-driven facilities.

Carhartt, maker of industrial strength clothing, has a new site design. In order to see it, first you get the chance to “blow up” their old design. From the rubble, the new design emerges. Clever! And it’s viral.

It sure beats the awful old practice of putting up an “under construction” page while a new site is being built (we’ve advised against that many times). Even if your current site is less than desirable, it’s better than no presence at all. Still, it’s fun to celebrate when you do take it down and launch fresh.

Remember, this is an Adobe Fireworks-only tip.

Step 1
Obtain said nasty JPG logo from the web site or client. In this case we will use the Lex Mundi logo.



Step 2
Place logo on the dark background in your layout



Step 3
Turn the logo into grayscale. Either adjust Hue/Saturation under Filters or convert to grayscale (Menu> Commands > Creative> Convert to Grayscale)



Step 4
Invert the logo (Filters> Adjust Color> Invert)



Step 5
Add a color fill (Filters> Adjust Color> Color Fill) and in the Color Fill Dialog box adjust the Blending Mode to Color Dodge. Adjust levels as needed for clarity.



Step 6
Choose the background color as the ground in the logo in the Blending Mode dialog box


That’s it. Hopefully you will receive a vector logo, but this will help when in a bind.

VenuElements is specifically tailored for venues, facilities and performing arts centers. It currently powers the websites for a number of major facilities around the U.S., including Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Prudential Center, Sprint Center, Target Center, RBC Center and more.

The idea is that Google is now indexing FOAF files and the XFN microformats to find and display publicly declared relationships between sites. Read the post on the Google Operating System blog for a good summary of how this works.

How linking strategies will evolve to include these self-declared links is unclear, but the idea that they will be indexed does make the effort seem worthwhile. Especially considering meta tags (keywords and descriptions) are ignored by most search engines, making other page elements more relevant. More indexed links theoretically should increase a given site’s popularity. If the “socially tagged” hyperlinks are considered more legitimate vs. meta tags by the search engines, they will indeed take off.