Art Direction, Design, Interactive Marketing, and Social Media - Greg Huntoon

This Blog Has Fallen Silent - It Needs Resurrection

By Greg Huntoon | August 16, 2009

These words are my first on this blog in well over two months. It geniunely is my hope to use this site as a way to connect with people on a variety of topics that are important and pertinent to me, but apparently, other things find higher priority right now. So, instead of just being completely quiet, I figured it might be best to show you what I’ve been doing, and where I’ve been doing it.

First and foremost, my beautiful wife and I gave birth to our third child, Ameenah Jane Ololade Huntoon in late April of this year. Without a doubt, she has been my primary focus. It’s an absolute joy and blessing to have such a wonderful family and incredible kids. It has always been the greatest goal of my life to be a father, and I’m a lucky guy to get to realize that dream each day.

In the past couple of months, things have been shook up on the work front as well. I left my job as Creative Director of Musicane (which recently launched a new homepage - my last site design work before leaving) in early July to jump back into the freelance world. While I enjoyed my time at Musicane, it was time to move on and get back into client work. Things are busy, but you know how freelancing goes. I’m still looking for the next right fit for me full-time, but for now, am quite happy and busy with the projects on my plate.

For those of you who don’t know, I also opened the doors of a new company, Humanity Snowboards, with my business partners Ryan Monson (also a childhood friend) and ex-Olympian snowboarder and champion, Tommy Czeschin. We’re just getting fired up, but this first season is looking to be a promising one. Ryan and I worked hard on hosting our first online contest on July 17th, which was met with great success. Check out the wrap-up.

Lastly, being a jock at heart, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of writing stories for fan-fueled sports channel BleacherReport.com over the course of the last year or so. In June, I was notified that I had been chosen to be a syndicated writer, and have been doing my best to cover my favorite teams: USC Football and LA Lakers, as well as a couple of articles about USA Soccer. But, as you’ll notice, my writing there has suffered too. Some days I really wish I could just write all day long.

I’m not sure how long it’s going to be until I’ll have the time to be constantly writing on this blog again, but I’m going to do my best to write as much as possible. Right now it has to take a backseat to family, deadlines, job searches, interviews, etc.

Posted in Career, Family, Personal, Work | Tagged ameenah, bleacher report, creative direction, football, freelancing, humanity snowboards, LA, lakers, musicane, Sports, USC, Writing | Leave a comment

Twitter, Please Stop Asking People What They’re Doing

By Greg Huntoon | June 2, 2009

Maybe I use Twitter differently than its intended purpose. I try to use Twitter as both a mass communication tool and also as a source of nearly instant conversion and chatter around a variety of topics, news and interesting/relevant links. Since very early on I’ve done my best not to update with “Eating a sandwich” or “starting the day with a cup of tea and inbox sorting” types of emails.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsilfver/178134761/

Unless I’m going to provide a link to the restaurant, the tea, or the GTD application that’s helping me achieve and maintain my inbox-zero status, I become one of the millions of people standing around yelling into this empty tunnel hoping someone hears me…or the reverberation of my nonsense. I have this visual of millions of people lined up with their heads stuck inside a big pipeline that stretches off into the horizon…and if you could see in, you’d see these million people just yelling things like:

“Just finished my coffee, off to class.”
“Loving this cake.”
“Think I’ll walk today.”
“I’m going home now. I’m bored, and hoping there’s something good on tv.”

Something tells me, if we could have something different next to the status update box, instead of “What are you doing?”, we might be able to reduce the amount of useless blabber. Maybe something along the lines of: “Anything interesting to add?”

I look down my list of tweets on my profile page from time to time to see how much red there is (red is my link color). The more tweets I have without any red…the more I’m one of those ostriches with my head in a tunnel.

Now, not everyone is going to find what I have to say relevant or interesting all of the time. I don’t presume to think that I’m that important. But I do know that there’s probably a reason that people follow me: either a) we’re friends in real life, b) know each other in the online space (or design arena), c) they’re following me because I follow them (in which case, they might not be listening at all), and/or d) they’re following me because they get something out of what I have to say.

So, in my mind, it’s my job to provide something of import or relevance when I tweet. A link. A picture. A reply to a question or conversation. Something.

But look, this is just my opinion. What do you think? How do you use Twitter? Do you try to provide added value to your stream and followers? What are you doing, if you’re not doing that?

Please jump in and get involved in the conversation. If you enjoyed this article, please consider leaving a comment below and sharing/bookmarking this article. Thank you kindly.

Posted in Community, Personal, Social Media, Web Apps | Tagged blabber, Links, relevance, status, twitter, updates, value | 6 Comments

Epic Change - Building a Locally-Led School in Tanzania

By Greg Huntoon | May 31, 2009

Drop what you are doing right now, for about 3 minutes, and you can help build a technology lab for a locally-led primary school in Tanzania. All you have to do, is go to this website Ideablob, and vote for Epic Change in a $10k contest. If Epic Change is still at the top of the list come midnight tonight, these kids in upcountry Tanzania will get themselves a brand-new technology lab.

A line of eager kids forms to vote for EpicChange

Don’t doubt that the money will immediately go to great use. Read about what Epic Change did with Tweetsgiving this past holiday season. They know what they’re doing when it comes to grassroots fundraising, bolting from a literally unknown non-profit to an instant darling of the then-(relatively)-tightknit Twitter community.

There really isn’t anything simpler for you. This won’t cost you a single penny. It won’t take but a minute for you to register with Ideablob, check for the confirmation email in your inbox, and click to vote in the sidebar on the right of their page. And by taking those simple steps, you can have a significantly positive effect on improving the education for these children.

So, go vote. And when you’re done, please share this blog post with your friends. Tweet about it. Share it on Facebook. Post it as a Myspace bulletin. Make it happen!

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.