Vivid Seats
CHICAGO, IL
Vivid Seats is a ticket exchange and resale company committed to helping fans get to any live event they want to see anywhere in North America, from music and entertainment to sports and public speakers. The popularity of the company grew incredibly fast, requiring them to move their original Chicago headquarters to a more expansive space in the city’s famous Marshall Field building.
Forcade was hired to completely reimagine the dated “man cave” aesthetic of the old office and design a new space that reflected the lively energy of the rapidly growing Vivid Seats brand.
Sound is one of the most important elements of a live event. So our design team custom-crafted creative ways to both represent and bring actual sound into the new Vivid Seats space.
This included a massive 40-ft. long sculptural sound wave that greets employees and visitors as they enter the office. Cleverly constructed of painted aluminum rods, the dynamic dimensionality of the installation envelops people in the feeling of a live event and sets the tone for the rest of the space.
We adorned the outside glass of meeting rooms and offices with larger-than-life graphics of famous performers in a dot-matrix pattern that allowed the windows to remain semi-transparent. And we gave each of the conference rooms an energetic name related to the photograph. But our design team didn’t stop there. We also assigned each of these rooms its own music soundtrack related to the individual imagery, accessible by scannable QR codes. It’s a multi-sensory experience that brings the energy of a live event into every Vivid Seats meeting.
To further the sound-based design aesthetic, we adorned the largest conference room with a room-length woofer sculpture. Embellishing the wall with more than 50 real woofers of multiple sizes created a striking three-dimensional artistic statement that ensures the inner essence of the Vivid Seats brand inspires every important employee gathering.
Vivid Seats doesn’t see itself as a mere ticket seller. They view their role as connecting people with life-enhancing experiences. Which led our design team to add memorable experiential moments throughout the new office.
These innovative design concepts included an awe-inspiring “candlelit” wall that’s reminiscent of the time when thousands of lighters were held up during night concerts. Plus, we put large interior wall spaces to use as colorful canvases that intriguingly highlighted a single event from multiple perspectives, including both the fan and performer viewpoints.
One of the most attention-grabbing experience-based ideas we developed within the space was multi-dimensional outlines of people in a concert environment. We used yachting cordage to create a beautiful, soft contour outline of a person against a full-wall-size, zig-zag patterned concert picture. Then we extended a dimensional hand holding a real iPhone off each outlined person. This surreal sculptural element represented the real-life behavior of people using their phones to capture the indelible memory of an event.
We purpose-designed all these experience-focused installations to bring a sense of action to the space, embodying the high level of activity at live events and inspiring employees to bring that same level of excitement to their day-to-day jobs.
To coalesce the multitude of multi-sensory design statements we added throughout the office, our design team carefully crafted each element as an expression of the overarching Vivid Seats brand.
This was accomplished by brilliantly balancing the grays and blacks of many of the design components with a bold use of the brand’s bright color palette. Which also helped our team connect disparate types of events together, including using a colorful foam finger pattern to transform a dormant elevator environment into a dynamic brand expression of sporting events.
The Vivid Seats logo itself also served as a design unifier throughout the office. The angular and color-blocked pattern of the logo inspired each installation’s layout. And we even brought the logo to life as a floor-to-ceiling main lobby sculpture that extended into the lighting above.
In designing Vivid Seats new office location, we helped the company holistically reimagine its brand expression. They’re in the business of selling energizing and enlivening human experiences, so the Forcade team sought to harness that energy and make it palpable for every moment every human spends in the space.
Explore our other work in the Corporate arena.
