If you know me well and call yourself my friend then you know that I'm not a fan of socks.

I'm not necessarily a sandal man, I just don't like socks.

Specifically, I wear my chucks sock-less. Now many of you who see me in person from time to time comment without fail at the "oddity" of seeing the skin of my foot through the opening of my twisted converse tongue.

Drop it. I don't like socks.

However, I still wonder why it seems like my pair of chucks only suffers from this limp-tongue syndrome. I have plenty of friends who wear such shoes and with no tongue malfunctions. In fact, I have friends who also boycott socks and still don't have this problem so don't tell me it's a sock thing.

The smallest amount of walking sends the tongue sliding down the side of my foot to one side. Every time.

Maybe converse will enforce a recall if I write them a letter? Does this happen to anyone else?

Do yourself a huge favor and watch this. It's powerful to say the least.

Throw the confetti because this is my 80th blog post and you know exactly what that means.

Nothing.

I've been extremely busy in the design game these days which I can't complain about. It's been a while since the volume of my freelance work has equaled what it does at the moment. God always sees me through.

I'm working on a great project at the moment: a 21-city conference tour entitled, "The Home Owner's Conference." Guest speakers include leading economic forecaster, Harry Dent and celebrated money expert, Loral Langemeir.

I've been brought on to brand the conference logo, website, some film work and additional collateral material. Quite the arduous task but worth the experience.

I wrote a song a while ago entitled, "Your City" and to commemorate the song and my current boredom, I brought the concept to life as a t-shirt design.

That's it. That's all I got.

Morale is a beautiful and complicated thing.

When it's high it's an unstoppable experience for any unified group. When it's low, things look bleak.

Lately, my eyes have been opened to the weighty responsibility on a leader to build and sustain a high team-morale. It's everything.

As a leader/vision caster in any arena, you have to continually feed hope and direction and confidence into your program. Just as barn yard animals need the daily slop - volunteers, followers and employees alike need regular reassurance of vision.

In the context of church leadership, I think of it this way: you are the sacred keeper of morale so guard it like the life of your church depends on it. Because it does.

You've probably heard the expression, "fake it 'till you make it." As much as I hate cliche's I love that statement for its timeless truth. Do whatever it takes to build your team morale and you'll see an army behind you.

I'm back from a small hiatus from blogging. I just had one of those weeks where I had nothing interesting nor profound to say and I didn't feel like forcing it.

What have I been working on in the meantime?

A magnificent exquisite decent work of art known as my portfolio.

As many of you know, I was petitioning the public for opinions on some brand prototypes that I was working on. The result of those much needed critiques transformed a concept into this new simple yet effective design.

Visit my portfolio and tell me what you think!

Columbia, South Carolina is a beautiful place.

I've been staying with friends of mine for the past few days just enjoying the shift in scenery and contour. Tampa doesn't know hills like this.

We drove through the University and saw several of the historical buildings unique to Columbia.

For dinner we ate at the Lizard's Thicket - this incredible down south home-cooked shmorgesboard. The sweet tea was flowing and my stomach was growing: beef stew, rice and gravy, creamed corn, potato salad, and corn bread.

I'll be back home tomorrow to my beloved Tampa. Thanks for the experience, South Carolina, you were good to me.

I'm getting ready to "professional" my portfolio because at the moment, I'm using my flickr account as a make-shift reference and it's in un-branded disarray. It's driving me nuts.

Here are some of the prototypes I've been experimenting with. Any votes?

I decided to re-post the picture from earlier today in color as well as the original version to contrast the manipulation that took place to achieve the HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography look = detail extravaganza.

I edited his eyes quite a bit with the dodge/burn tool to look more blue and glazed. The detail and dirt on his face was also manipulated in the same way. I also sharpened some of the key areas of existing texture (wrinkles, blemishes, hair, etc.) to over exaggerate his age and physical condition. The original image was very sharply contrasted so I applied a guassian blur over the entire image to soften the edges.

Add some channel mixing and photo filter (warming filter 85 at 37% density) layers and you have your final product.

Photo + Desaturation + Shadows/Highlights + Excerpt = Self Explanatory.