Developed by Marco Arment, Instapaper is a simple application that allows users to save online articles and read them later at their own convenience. A year ago when I was still commuting everyday from Virginia into Washington DC using the Metro, Instapaper was my reading tool on my iPod Touch. Before heading to work or leaving work, I would save a handful of articles I want to read during the train ride.

One of the activities Instapaper deems important is downloading the main content of the articles on the web and presenting them in a way that is legible and readable on the user’s devices. Instapaper makes saving articles easy via “Read Later” bookmarklet. Once the bookmarket is on the browser’s bookmark bar, users can click on it when they are on a page or an article they want to read later.

One of Instapaper’s standout features is the capability to ignore related elements surrounding the article such as the navigations, sidebars and especially annoying ads. For example, reading an article on a web site like New York Times is quite distracting because of all the moving ads, sidebars, paginations (an article is broken down to several pages) and tiny fonts. Trying to read the New York Times on a small device like an iPod Touch is even worse. Users have to constantly zoom into the text to read. Instapaper changed all of that. By focusing on the main content and stripping away unnecessary elements, Instapaper makes reading much more pleasurable.

Instapaper defines the attributes of the information it process by saving the articles for the users. Before Instapaper, I collect my favorite online articles by printing them out and saving them. Instapaper allows me to save that paper-wasting process and have my favorite articles all in one place. Once my collected articles are saved and downloaded into Instapaper, I don’t need Internet access to read them. I can open up the app on my iPod and read the articles whenever or wherever I prefer. I can archive as many articles as I like and I can delete the ones that I don’t want to keep.

Sharing information is not important to Instapaper because its main service is to collect, but it does make sharing easy. Users can post a link to social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinboard and Evernote. Instapaper requires users to create a free account to archive all the articles. Since Instapaper only asks for email address and a new password to sign up for an account, maintaining users private information is fairly minimal. All the transactions of purchasing the software are done through Apple’s app store or Android’s app store. Instapaper generates its revenue by offering the service to users. While Instapaper has several competitors such as Readability and Pocket, its elegant design and continuous refinement make Instapaper a fine tool for reading online articles offline.

(Fourth essay for Graduate Design Seminar)

Added two movie posters I created for my Advanced Typography class. The assignment was to choose a horror or comedy film, design for one genre and then flip it for the opposite genre. Since this is a typography class, I can only use 10% illustration and 90% typography. I ended up redesigning Donnie Darko, which I started out with the horror version and then flipped it for comedy. Though the process was a pain, I like the way they turned out. Now I have to frame the print versions on mounting boards, something I had never done before.

My next project fo the Advanced Typography class is to redesign a menu for an existing restaurant. The catch is that the restaurant has to be small, inexpensive “mom and pop” joint with a simple, poorly designed menu. I knew exactly where I could find the materials.

Today I head to Eden for lunch with a few restaurants in mind. My first stop was Thanh Truc’s. This is a small shop with a very selected menu: bun bo hue and com tam. I explained to the owner the purpose of borrowing the menu. If his menu is selected for a redesign, I would give it to him for free once the project is completed. He can use it if he wants to. If not it doesn’t cost him a penny. His menu is simple a laminated piece of paper; therefore, it’s a perfect candidate.

Then I went over to Thanh Van. They only serve vegan food so I thought I could play with the green concept. Unfortunately the owner didn’t want to let me borrow his menu. Pho Xe Lua should be fun to play around with the train concept as well, but the owner didn’t let me use it either. So I went to Hai Ky Mi Gia. I was pretty sure that she would have no problem with it since I dine there quite frequent. To my surprise, she refused and just wouldn’t give me a reason. They must have thought that I try to steal their ideas to open my own restaurant or something. If I were to head to Viet Bistro, I am sure Antonio would let me use his, but his menu looks very nice already. It looks to me like he’s only one who take great pride in his menu.

I used the same approach to American’s “mom and pop” places and all of them were glad to provide me their menus. They even told me that they would love to see the new design if their menu was selected.

More and more dictionary users prefer online over print for speed and convenience. Accessing an online dictionary by typing in a word is much faster than thumbing through the pages in the print edition. While the smallest unit of a print dictionary might be 1,000 pages due to its unisequential design, the smallest unit of an online dictionary depends on the hardware resource (the bigger the space the more information is stored) due to its multisequential design.

Because of its linear, unisequential design, print dictionary is standardized based on alphabetical order. To look up a word, the users need to flip to the first letter of the word and then go to the next letter until they find the word they are searching for. Because of its non-linear, multisequential design, online dictionary is standardized based on word input. In her book, Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray argues:

Programmable bits can imitate legacy media and present unisequential documents and film clips, but they are particularly well suited to more complex multisequential objects that can be assembled and navigated in more than one order. Computational structures allow us to describe entities as variables that can have different values at different times, and to make conditional statements that have more than one possible outcome (Page 53).

In print, to know what items are available users simply have to look them up and make sure that they didn’t miss or misspell the word. In online, the application would tell the users if the items are available. It would also make suggestions if the users misspelled the word. The suggestion alone (something like, “Did you mean…”) saves the users time and confusion.

How items are chosen for inclusion depend on their usage. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary:

To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it’s used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.

In term of reliable information, users should use resources they trust. For example, if they trust the Merriam-Webster dictionary, they should use the same source for both online and print. In term of availability, the print edition is much more reliable. The online version relies on the connection to the Internet and the usage of the server. Users may experience slowness and unreliability if the connection is weak, the server is flushed with traffic or the application is not optimized for performance.

In print, updates only get pushed once in a few years. Cost for printing is the reason. Furthermore, making corrections are even slower in print. For online, updates are simply a click of a button. The online dictionary could be updated any time and the users would get the immediate change, which is a huge advantage of online over print dictionary.

As someone who works and spends most of the time on the web, I choose to use digital over traditional dictionary. I prefer the speed and the multisequential objects of the digital media. At times I just type in the word that I am not sure of to get suggestions to the right word. And because the thesaurus is a tab away, I could get to the synonyms and the antonyms with one click rather than putting down the paper dictionary and picking up the paper thesaurus. In the past year or so, however, I don’t use the online edition as much as I used to because all of the dictionary sites are filled with ads. Dictionary.com, in particular, sometimes makes me click on the ad first before I could access the search box.

According to Murray, “The biggest different between the computer and earlier media of representation is its procedural property, its ability to represent and execute conditional behaviors.” As I have mentioned above, the online dictionary uses procedural medium to response to its users. The online dictionary would present the definition if it recognizes the word or make a suggestion to the word the users might be looking for. As for the use of the participatory medium, the online dictionary allows users to interact with the information such as clicking on the link to read more definition or click on the tab to read its synonyms and antonyms. In term of spatial affordances, the use of visual cue of the audio icon is highly effective. The audio pronunciation is extremely useful for words that are hard to say as well as for foreigners, like myself, whose English is a second language. This use of spatial affordance can’t be accomplished through the print dictionary.

(Second essay for Graduate Design Seminar)

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” Those first spoken words from Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, through the wire on March 10, 1876 changed the way we communicate forever. Even today telephones continue to play an important role in our daily life. Almost everyone carries one with him all the time. Telephones serve the core human needs: the ability to communicate in real time with almost everyone around the world through voice interaction.

Before the invention of the telephones, most forms of communication were through letters and telegraph messages. Letters, although is still widely used today, could take days (if not weeks) to send and receive. The further the destinations the longer the letters take to get there. Telegraph messages were much quicker than letters but also limited to sending and receiving one at a time. In addition, one doesn’t get to hear the human voice, which is the core function that makes the telephone one of the most popular tools in communication.

Although the telephones evolve over the years, the core functionalities and the conventions remain the same. For example, the invention of the rotary dial, which developed by Antoine Barnay to connect the caller and receiver without the switchboard operator, is one of the features users are familiar with. When we moved from the rotary dial to push dial, the numbering system is still recognizable to users. Even now the mobile phones with touch-screen dials incorporate the numbering system so that the users don’t have to relearn something that they are used to. Another older convention that made its way back to the mobile phones is texting. Unlike the old telegraph messages, however, texting could be sent and received much faster and with more than one person.

New technologies bring new enhancements to old conventions. Ringtones, for instance, allow users to customize the sound or music to their own liking or set up various rings to differentiate the types of caller. Users didn’t have those options for the older phones. On the basic level, however, both the old and the new phones provide the same functionality: to notify users when they have a call.

The risings of smartphones have met many needs that the predigital phones couldn’t. The iPhone, for instance, is not just a phone, but also more like a little computer. Users can use the web to browse information, read articles or make purchase online. They can play games and listen to music. The can take photos and send them to their social networks. They can locate places closed by or navigate their way around the map.

The evolving of telephones in the past 136 has been a phenomenon to watch. The use of telephone obviously is not going away any time soon. In fact, the mobile phone has been expanded extremely fast in the last couple of years. The next evolvement or innovation of the telephone will be here much sooner than we might have expected.

(First essay for Graduate Design Seminar)

I started my freshman year at La Salle University. I came in as a communication major. I actually didn’t even know what communication major was. My cousin advised me I should go into it because I liked music and movie. After the first semester I knew right away public speaking was not for me. Then I decided to switch to the major that almost every Asian guy went into: computer science. But when I looked at the curriculum I knew computer since was not for me. Fortunately, the computer science and art department decided to create a brand new major called Digital Arts and Multimedia Design. Without knowing what it was I switched to it simply because it sounded cool to me.

With my first Pentium II PC my mom bought with a loan from my cousin and the Adobe and Macromedia programs the computer lab technician at La Salle hooked me up, my career was born. Fifteen years later I still love what I do. Throughout my professional career I learned most of the things myself including design. Today I am starting the next chapter of my education. Actually I started last year in Information Systems Technology, but had to drop within two months. For one, I decided to move on to a new position. For two, the real reason, I was not into the business side of it.

Graphic design is a much better fit for me. Most of my web works in the early days were drawn from graphic design. Now with the explosion of web typography and high quality retina display, learning the established design principles from print makes a whole lot of sense. I am very excited to broadening my design sensibility.

I am admitted to George Mason School of Art‘s graduate program in graphic design. I feel like a high school kid getting his first college acceptance letter. In a decade of working in higher-ed institution, I am finally taking advantage of the tuition benefit for something that I truly want to learn and earn a degree. I am positive that the program will make me a better designer.

Many thanks to my bosses (past and present) for their wonderful letter of recommendation. Mad props to my sister-in-law’s husband for proofreading my expanded goal statements and my writing sample, in which I wrote about “White Space, Miles Davis and Responsive Web Design.” I am also sure that the portfolio that I put together in a couple of hours got in the the door. Visualgui not only landed me freelance projects, but also get me into graduate program. I am definitely looking forward toward the Fall semester this year.

When I accepted the position of Web Services Developer at George Mason University School of Law in October 2011, I took on the technical challenges such as server administration, content management system support and database maintenance. What attracted me the most to the job, however, was the opportunity to design the school’s web site. In my twelve years of experience in web-related fields, design has always played a major role in my career path.

My passion for design started in my sophomore year at La Salle University where I received my undergraduate degree in Digital Arts and Multimedia Design. Even though I wanted to do creative work, I had no clue about design. When I turned in my first web page for a class in digital art, the professor shook her head in disbelief. The page had six different typefaces, a bunch of uncoordinated colors and a handful of animated graphics. The expression I saw on the professor’s face, which I still remember today, gave me a hint that I didn’t do something right. We had a talk and she suggested that I start from the basics.

I took her advice to heart, and began learning color, typography and white space. Working with these three basic visual elements, I developed an appreciation for simplicity. When designing web pages, the minimalist approach allowed me to concentrate on the content and message. My style came together when I landed my first professional job as a web designer at Vassar College. In addition to creating design work for the school, I was surrounded by a group of talented individuals including graphic designers, illustrators and typographers. I have learned so much from this group simply by our daily interaction. By taking each other’s constructive criticisms and insightful suggestions, we grew together as a team.

After Vassar, I took on a new position as a web developer at the George Washington University School of Business. Although my main role was to maintain the school’s web pages in accordance with the University’s unified web presence, I always sought out creative opportunities like creating banners, book covers, print ads and web promotional materials. In addition, when not working at my fulltime job, I took on freelance web design projects to keep my creativity flowing.

Over the years, design has stayed with me no matter what career I embark upon. Pursuing a Master of Art in Graphic Design would not only strengthen my professional career, but also channel and broaden my passion for design. I am looking forward to studying the theory of graphic design as well as advanced topics including typography, brand identity design and web design. One of my goals in the future is to share my knowledge for design, and the Master of Arts program at George Mason University School of Art will qualify me to do so.

(Written for Master of Arts in Graphic Design George Mason University Admission)