Was cruising around some advertising sites today and came across this video on pleasefeedtheanimals.com. Upon viewing, I knew it was something good to share.

Posted by Gary at 3:46 PM | Permalink

"The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change, for happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up." - Charles L. Morgan

I'm generally a happy person. I like to think that I project a happy persona onto others and attack life in a fun manner. Much of my happiness has been from working in a career for which I have great passion and in experiencing success. But as I've gotten older, the success and career has yielded a dwindling return of happiness.

I have worked in the action sports industry for over a decade, mostly in wintersports, where I love skiing and being in the mountains. First at Helly Hansen, then K2 and lastly working for myself producing ski films and webisodes. I have been extremely fortunate. Yet somewhere in the last six months it lost its luster.

Part of it involves working from home. Now that has some serious perks, being my own boss, setting my own schedule, commuting from my bedroom to my home office and being able to go skiing whenever theres powder. It also has some negative aspects. I'm a very social person who enjoys personal interaction, that isn't being fulfilled via my cell phone or computer. I have grown to miss a dynamic, social work environment.

If you ask my parents or people who know me, I've been slow to mature. I've finally outgrown the wintersports industry. I found myself at premieres wanting younger people to be quiet, to stop talking to the person next to them and pay attention. To stop partying so much and get things done. It just made me feel old. A lot also has to do with it being a popularity contest, I think I became tired of trying to project "cool." I seem to place more value on substance than cool these days.

I could go on about the subtleties that brought me to this realization I was no longer happy doing what I was doing, but there is no reason to dwell on the past. Some friends have asked me why in the world I would ever stop what I was doing, but I'm much more interested in discussing what's next.

I'm shelving the G Brand, going to reorganize my life, get in better shape, update my resume, website and portfolio and then look for work at an Advertising Agency. It's going to take me a couple weeks to get everything organized, going through external hard drives and finding particular projects I want to showcase. Plus I have some ideas on how to freshen up this website, which I've done nothing to but blog since launching in October of 2006. This thing has gotten a bit stale.

Going to try and get back to blogging on a regular basis. It needs to become more habit than a chore.

You know, I figure it's a new year, actually a new decade... why not have a new decade resolution to better myself, continue learning and challenge myself in a new industry? To broaden my social network and experience new things. I have so much more I want to achieve in my life and career. The beautiful thing about life is that you can change whenever you want. Tomorrow is a new day with new possibilities waiting around the corner.

Posted by Gary at 12:32 PM | Permalink

Making product videos can be difficult. It's hard to make them creative, entertaining and educational. Draplin and crew manage to make a cool one minute video to promote his different colors of Field Notes. Check it out:

Okay, so it doesn't hit on all three, but it wasn't supposed to be super eductional. To order his goodness, go to fieldnotesbrand.com and to check out all the cool stuff Aaron has going on, check out DDC.

Posted by Gary at 3:57 PM | Permalink

I am happy to announce that all my Apple products seem to be working properly again. I've done a few software updates, addressed my font book problem, updated my iPhone apps, contacts, iTunes, and organized all my files on external hard drives. I think I just had too much going on.

A warning to not so savvy design people, don't load all your fonts. I have a ton of fonts due to the different projects I've worked on. I started to update my InDesign portfolio file, but didn't have some old Helly Hansen or my own G Brand fonts activated. So I needed to re-link all the paths for imagery and re-activate the fonts. I used to use Extensis Suitcase, where you can have tons of different fonts for your typography needs, which allows the user to turn them off and on when you need them. Well, with my new MacBook Pro, I didn't have that software, so I just loaded all my fonts into the font book. It's slowed everything down, as I had thousands of fonts loading every time I opened an application.

The hard part is you can't just go back to a default setting, you have to delete font folders one by one. Yeah, slightly time consuming after loading a few thousand different types of fonts. Don't make the same mistake I did.

Anyway, now I'm all happy with my MacBook Pro and my whole Apple family of tech toys. I'm once again drinking from the Apple cool-aide.

Posted by Gary at 3:43 PM | Permalink