Clean
This site gets a bit realigned. The Swiss design was a nice experiment. Unfortunately it was not working as smoothly as I had expected. Although I love Proxima Nova, its Vietnamese diacritical marks are simply not legible, particularly on the uppercase letters. Another major problem that needed to be addressed was the vertical wordmark. On really tall monitors, like the portrait screen my wife is using for her work, the wordmark gets really big, which ends up obscuring the content. In addition, readability is not optimal in the sans serif typeface; therefore, I wanted to go back to a more traditional reading experience.
I still keep Proxima Nova for the wordmark and the UI elements, but replaced the body copy with Adobe Text Pro, which is one of my favorite text faces that has Vietnamese support. In the work section, I want to go back to display full-screen SVG images. I added a new book section to promote my web-based books as well as printed books I have collected.
The goal for this realignment is to provide a clean, crisp design with the focus on readability. I hope this minimal version will live on for a while until I find new inspiration. I don’t think I can strip this design down any further.