John Cade

My last post about Bonnaroo was very brief, so I thought I would share a couple of details about the design contest.  Anyone with an account on bonnaroo.com could enter by creating a design and uploading it to their personal profile.  The process was extremely easy for the designers and it allowed all bonnaroo.com users to rate each design, save them as favorites, or leave a comments on them.  In all the judges selected designs by five people.  Each design will be on Bonnaroo merchandise, available for purchase at the festival, and hopefully online at a later date as well.  The design contest was a great way to get Bonnaroo 2008 attendees invovled and encourage creativity.  This is actually one of my goals at LifeWay, so it was great to have this sort of user experience on the Bonnaroo website.

The prize for winning is two free tickets for the festival.  Because the tickets are free to us, and Meredith works for Creative Artists Agency (which got us BOTH in for free last year), we have had about 20 requests from people either to take them off of our hands at no cost or to purchase them from us.  We are not sure if Meredith will be getting a free pass from work or not this year, so we have not made any promises to anyone about whether or not the tickets will be available.  Thanks to those of you who sent a nice congrats rather than simply asking for a free ticket.  Your intentions and sincerity have been noted :).

Some of the artists I plan on seeing are Death Cab for Cute, My Morning Jacket, Pearl Jam, The Raconteurs, Ben Folds, OAR, De Novo Dahl, and Steel Train.  I will also peek in on the New Orleans Superjam with Johnny Vidacovich.  He is one of the greatest drummers from New Orleans and it would be a mistake pass it up.  I really haven’t had time to plan out my entire schedule, but I’m sure there will be others I will want to see as well.

The winners were officially announced on the Bonnaroo website yesterday - here is a screenshot!  Or view the live page.

For the first time in my life, I’ve won a design contest!  Granted, the last one I entered was probably when I was 13 years old.  The design itself is pretty simple.  However, I feel like I captured the Bonnaroo feel pretty well.  Here it is!