Wow. It’s already April. Did anybody else see that coming? It kind of snuck up on us.

Well, what a day to have this month’s Stabbed in the Art. Yes, it’s still the first Friday just like every other month. BUT, this particular Friday is April Fool’s Day. We don’t have any surprises in store for you (yet), but feel free to bring your mischievous side with you to the show.

If you’ve never attended Stabbed in the Art, here are the details:

Friday, April 1st (first Friday of every month), 6:00 – 10:00pm
1284 Perkins Rd (corner of Perkins and Terrace next to the Garden District Animal Hospital)

Local Artists (usually between 15-20)
100% of sale goes to artist (no commission)

Are you an artist? Know one? All you have to do is bring your art by the TigerDistrict.com warehouse (address above) between 1:00 - 6:00 pm. It’s first come, first serve on space to hang (space has been going quick, so the earlier the better). Bring your art (and necessary hardware to hang your work) and some wine or beer to give out, and you’re welcome to join us. It’s pretty much that simple. Feel free to email me if you have questions about that. We’re always looking for new artists, so please come!

Some other cool events to keep in mind (details below):

Live Art Battle at the Varsity with a live aerialist

F.A.M.E. The 2nd Annual Little Black Dress Edition @ Varsity Theatre – April 9

Hosted by: Gerald Spohrer, Martine Duhe, Josh Fontenot, Dustin Singletary, Brock Hanna, and Dexter Fontenot

DJ Triz-A provides the soundtrack for the evening. The theme for the evening is little black dresses for the women while men dress nicely to complement. Also that night for your entertainment is a live aerialist performance by Ashley Gieg (girls will literally be swinging from the ceiling) and a live art battle with Alex Harvie, TJ Black, Marc Fresh, and Jade Brady.

18 to enter
Sponsored by vitaminwater and Smirnoff

Photography by Viral Image Productions

www.wildflowerpresents.com

Stabbed’s very own Alex Harvie will be going head-to-head with Christopher Turner in a Live Art Battle.

225 Hot of the Press Party

Roux House
Thursday March 31st
5:30-7:30pm

Mentorship Academy April Fool’s Comedy night

http://bit.ly/LOL_BR

Friday, April 1st @ 339 Florida St. Downtown BR

LOL Comedy Series Featuring BET’s Comic View Comedian Van Chew

Hosted by Tony King is Funny

plus special guest C-Bazz and Friends

Starts at 8pm

$10 Suggested Donation

For more info, call 225-346-5180

-All proceeds to benefit Mentorship Academy of Digital Arts and Science and Technology-

Republished from an email sent by Jared Loftus of Stabbed in the Art.

The conference is billed as the most prominent Republican event prior to the next national convention. Top Republican law makers from around the country are expected to be at the conference in June 2011.

We’re proud of what Zach is doing and excited to have assisted him with his new website.

The new PolicyPitch.com website designed by Gatorworks

The Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC)

Scheduled for April 8-11 in New Orleans, the SRLC is the most prominent GOP gathering outside of the national convention. Confirmed speakers include Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Tax Gov. Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and more. The SRLC will be carried on Fox and CNN, and Sean Hannity will broadcast live. More than 3,500 people are expected to participate.

We are pleased to have had such a large impact on the national conference.

SRLC Website Screenshot

Here is a quick tour of the main areas of the site:

Once the child creates an account, he/she will be greeted by the elf and see this home page. This is Santa's Island where the child can begin their journey!

If the child clicks on the snowman, he/she will see a naked snowman with a box that contains various articles of clothing and accessories. The child can click and drag the items over to the snowman to create one of their own. If an article of clothing doesn’t look just right, then the child can drag the item over to the trash can to remove it.

We decided to make a cowboy, bowler Snowman!

If the child goes over to Santa’s Mailroom, he/she will see a very active room with letters being sucked down a pipeline and being dropped into a pile in the center of the room. A friendly elf is quickly sorting the letters into “naughty” or “nice” pipelines that go directly to Santa’s office. If the child clicks on the colored letters on the ground, he/she can read a letter written from other children to Santa.

The Elf in Santa's Mailroom quickly sorts letters from children across the world.

Santa’s Toy Factory is my favorite part of the website. This is where children can see the worker elves in action making plenty of toys. There’s a countdown to Christmas on the wall at the top right, and the child has the option to click on a toy of their choice on the conveyor belt. If the child clicks on a toy, a window will pop-up that pulls the actual image of the product from Amazon. Then, the child has the option to add the toy to his/her “wishlist.”

Toys are quickly being assembled by elves in Santa's Toy Factory.

The final component of the site allows the child to email Santa Claus, and the child has the option to include items in the email that they selected from Santa’s Toy Factory.

So, as you can see, this was a rather involved project that required a great deal of custom illustration and then custom animation (and action script) using Adobe Flash. We were very excited to win an ADDY for this project at the 2010 awards show this year.

I invite you to visit the actual site so you can see these screenshots come to life and hear the jolly Christmas music we have playing in the background. If you have children, I encourage you to let them visit the site and have some fun next Christmas!

Do you like this site? Check out some other completed projects by our award-winning team.

With more than 60,000 entries annually, the national ADDY® Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY® Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from around the world. The American Advertising Federation conducts the ADDY® Awards through its 200 member advertising clubs and 15 districts. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry, for the industry.

This year’s local competition produced 446 entries from Baton Rouge professionals and LSU students. Judging was held January 16, 2010 at Lamar Advertising. Renee Miller, President/Creative Director of The Miller Group in Los Angles, Ca.; Jim Dudley, Broadcast, Copywriter, Creative Director of Dudley Creative in Roanoke, Va.; and Jimmy Ball, Art Director/Designer, Photographer, Interactive of Jimmy Ball Design in Dallas, Texas, served as judges for the competition.

Gatorworks brought home a Silver ADDY award for their client project, Santa’s Online Wishlist. Santa’s Online Wishlist is an interactive website where children can dress a snowman, have fun in Santa’s Toy Factory, view Santa’s Mailroom, and best of all send emails to Santa Claus. The website took approximately 6 months to hand-draw, custom illustrate, and then custom animate using Adobe Flash software. David Link, Creative Director and lead designer/developer on the project, said, “It’s really nice to be recognized for our hard work, especially in a community as talented as AAF.”

At the red carpet ceremony, 41 gold ADDY®s, 50 silver ADDY®s, three Special Judge’s Awards, a Mosaic Award, Best of Show and Best of Category awards were presented. Advertising students were also recognized with 17 gold ADDY®s, 19 silver ADDY®s, a Best of Show and Special Judges’ Awards. ADDY® 2010* also recognized professional excellence on the business side of the advertising industry with its Pinnacle Awards.

Here is your chance to decide on the elite creative advertising work in Baton Rouge. American Advertising Federation-Baton Rouge has created online voting for four different categories – print, radio, broadcast and interactive – to be awarded at the 2010 ADDY® Awards.

Voting is held online at http://www.aafbr-pca.org/. You can vote once per entry every 24 hours for as many entries as you want in each category. The entrant with the most votes wins! Voting closes at the end of the day on February 14, 2010.

Winner’s will be announced the night of the 2010 ADDY® Awards show on February 20 at the Louisiana State Museum. Tickets are available online at http://www.addy2010.com for $60 and $30 for students. Doors open at 6:30 for a cocktail reception prior to the show.

All entries into 2010 People’s Choice Awards are property of each owner. All entries included were entered properly using the guidelines placed by AAF National and AAF-Baton Rouge.

Check out a small sampling of some of the websites we’ve designed, developed, and maintained throughout the last year.

Giraphic Apparel: http://www.giraphicapparel.com

Giraphic Prints: http://giraphicprints.com/

Giraphic Blog: http://thinkgiraphic.com/

Hoist & Crane Service Group: http://www.hoistcrane.com/

LA Office of Juvenile Justice:  http://www.ojj.la.gov

LA Dept. of Veterans Affairs: http://www.vetaffairs.la.gov/

Louisiana Finance Assoc: http://www.louisianafinanceassociation.com/

Metropolitan Gastroenterology Assoc: http://www.metrogi.com/

Republican Party of LA: www.lagop.com

Rotolo’s Restaurant: http://www.rotolos.com/

Santa’s Online Wishlist: http://www.santasonlinewishlist.net

Southern Republican Leadership Conference: http://www.srlc2010.com

Stein Engineers: http://www.steinengineers.com

Surgir Real Estate Development: http://www.surgirllc.com/

The Tradewind Report: http://www.tradewindreporting.com

Tiger Bookmarket: http://www.tigerbookmarket.com/

VasoCare Healthcare: http://www.calmrestlesslegs.net/

VoxBox: http://www.yourvoxbox.com

Zymeaux Mobile Marketing: http://www.zymeaux.com

Tickets: 225.216.0660, theparktheatre.com
$10 – AAF-BR and SME-GBR members
$25 – General Public

The social media revolution has changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. Learn social media techniques that will improve your sales from a master marketer.

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. In so doing, he learned that the Internet offers up potential via these free tools for businesses and individuals alike to develop their own brand. Gary will touch on his core themes for best utilizing these tools, including why listening is more important than speaking, the importance of authenticity in business, and what it means to “scale your caring.” Learn more about Gary at garyvaynerchuk.com, or catch him on Twitter where he has over 840,000 followers!

Join Gary at a Wine and Cheese Reception before the event from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost to attend the reception is $250.
Information courtesy of AAFBR.

11:30AM
The techies are in the LaunchPad conference room planning out the technical aspect of the project. Matt Tritico is jumping from the concept meetings to the technical meetings to try to keep an open dialogue between both groups. Our goal is to have a system by 4PM today. We’re thinking WordPress might be the technology to use.

11:40AM
Tritico just ordered pizza- will be here in an hour! Gatorworks will host the system.

11:55AM
Chris Schultz is heading up the concept meeting, and we’re going through our site architecture. Chris’ wife just walked in to join us! Here’s the temporary link for testing our system: http://www.gatortesting.net/schooldistrict/

12:10PM
The proposed domain name is nolaschoolvolunteers.org

12:25PM
The email address info@nolaschoolvolunteers.org has been set up. Our concept meeting will be meeting with the technical guys after lunch. Lunch should be here within the next 15-20 minutes I think. We’re going to purchase a WordPress theme to use.

12:40PM
We’re breaking for lunch right now. We’ll be back online in a bit!

1:00PM
We’re back at it- both the concept group and technical group is now coming together to discuss our ideas. We have 3 hours to code the system!

1:20PM
Chris Schultz just finished briefing the room on what our concept meeting discussed. Now Stanford Rosenthal is briefing the room on what the techies discussed in their meeting. I think the site architecture is pretty much finalized. We’re discussing specific WordPress plugins to use, etc.

Our goal is to thank the past and current volunteers of the NOLA public schools, report the latest happenings of volunteer projects in the schools, and help mobilize new volunteers for the NOLA public school system.

1:30PM
We’re getting ready to break out into teams again. We’re going to have different teams assigned to developing the various WP plugins we’ll need to achieve our goals. We’ll have copy writers working on gathering content. The energy is great in the room…people are stepping up and taking ownership of various pieces of the project.

2:10PM
The theme has been selected, and we’re getting ready to install on the server now. Thanks to Marc Juneau and Chris Schultz with the help on selecting the theme. We have several dev groups working on the WP plugins, and Andrew Larimer is going to work on modifying the design.

2:20PM
The theme is now installed and activated at http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org. We’re working on customizing the site according to the site map and architecture we’ve put together.

2:55PM
Things are coming together. We’re going to re-group in about 5 minutes to see what needs to happen during our final hour of development. I’m working on a press release that will communicate what we’ve done for our local community and help encourage technology professionals to join us for our next BarCamp. We are talking about planning a BarCamp in Baton Rouge in the Spring of 2010!

3:40PM
I just finished draft 1 of the press release, and I’m feeling pretty good about what was accomplished today. We have about 20 minutes or so left, and I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. Tung Ly has been documenting everything we’re doing so Troy Peloquin of the Recovery School District will be able to take this system moving forward and be able to update the content on a regular basis.

4:15PM
We have some guys working overtime over here at BarCampNOLA. However, the project is just about finished, and we just need to populate with content now. Check out http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org.

4:30PM
Ok, I’m going to go ahead and call it a day. We did it… we developed a website in ONE day in support of the New Orleans public school system. BarCampNOLA would not have been possible without our sponsors: Voodoo Ventures, LaunchPad, Humid Beings, Gatorworks, and Newstwit.com.

Today was truly inspiring.