The first assignment for our graduate seminar, which focused on analog typography, was to explore the expressive range of non-traditional type. We had to choose a theme: “fire, water, earth and air” or “summer, spring, winter and fall (or autumn).” Then we had to create each word without the use of the computer and each composition must be executed with one of the following media: wet (paint, ink, etc.), dry (pencils, crayons, charcoal, ballpoint, etc.), collage (2D or 3D) and mechanical/photographic means.

For my project, I chose “fire, water, earth and air.” For the execution, I selected food as my media. For fire, I used crushed chilly peppers. The reason is obvious: hot peppers burn like fire. That was the easiest one to do and it met the dry media requirement. For earth, I wanted to convey organic; therefore, I made a collage of whatever my wife had at home (green beans, onion, carrot, mint, garlic and tangerine) into the word. For air, I picked popcorns since they are as light as air. To meet the mechanical/photographic means, I took a shot of the composition.

Water was a bit tricky to pull off. My initial concept was to freeze the ice cubes with food coloring. Once they are frozen, I could assemble them into the word “water” and let the ice melt a bit before taking the photo of it. Then I came across some watermelon in the refrigerator and the idea went off. Water in watermelon, get it? So I smashed up the watermelon and let the juice spilled over the canvas with the word “water” spelled out. That also met the wet media requirement.

I had fun playing with this project. It’s a special feeling to do the craft with your hand instead of relying on the computer even though I used some Photoshop to clean up the photography. I also had a personal assistant helping me out with the execution. Thanks baby!

Like many self-taught web designers, I questioned the value of academia. Before enrolled into the master program in graphic design at the George Mason University School of Art, I wondered if the investment worthwhile. Would I get anything out of school or would I just waste my time? As I listened to a few web design podcasts that covered the same topic, I had more doubts. Many web designers left school because they found the programs weren’t up to speed with the industry. They weren’t taught responsive web design or the latest technologies.

Even though I was unsure about going back to school, I applied for an MA program away because the degree would allow me to teach and share my passion for web design. In spring of 2012, I was accepted into the program and decided to give it a try. After more than ten years, I was excited to be back to the classroom environment. For my first semester, I took a four-credit course on advanced typography and one-credit course on graduate design seminar.

As much as I love type, I struggled in advanced typography. I could hardly keep up with the professor’s expectation. Each class I had to bring in 20 to 30 pieces of work for critique. As a result, I just had to churn out work, but had no time to refine any of it. I made it through the class, but it was stressful. I didn’t learn much because the course felt like an acrobatic exercise than creative thinking. Once again, I wondered if the efforts and the investments worth it. I thought of dropping out, but decided to give it one more shot.

In the spring of 2013, I took a four-credit advanced web design and a one-credit seminar. I had been doing web design for the past ten years and my technological skills were fairly up to date; therefore, the web design course should be a piece of cake. I was wrong. I struggled even more. While the professor wanted me to do sketches on papers and mockups in Photoshop, I wanted to jump straight into the browser. Our approaches were totally different. Since I was the one being graded on, I needed to follow the professor’s approach.

While I was having a hard time with my advanced web design class, I had fun in the seminar class. For the entire semester the class focused on building a board game. I created a jazz trivia game. What I enjoyed so much about the class was that I was working something that interested me. Rather than just getting the assignment done, I put the effort into the work. At the same time, I got to know a classmate that changed my perspective on schooling. Even though the seminar was just a one-credit, he put 200% into his projects. He went the extra miles on everything he did and that inspired me.

In the fall of 2013, I took a four-credit course on brand identity design and a one-credit seminar. I did well on both because I turned the assignments into opportunities. Rather than just trying to fulfill the requirements, I selected the subjects that I was passionate about and that made the whole different. I put more thoughts into the contents and the design process.

It took me three semesters to realize that you get out of graduate school what you put in. The courses won’t prepare you for the newest trend in the industry, but they prepare you for critical thinking and problem solving. As a result, I learned to select classes that would broaden my horizon rather than classes that teach technical skills. Instead of choosing classes that I know I could breeze through, I would choose classes that would challenge me. In that regard, graduate school is worthwhile.

Since the focus of this seminar is on analog typography, I would like to present one of my favorite type designers whose work involved mostly with hand lettering. Her name is Jessica Hische. Here’s a short bio of Jessica from The Great Discontent:

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, and self-described “avid internetter”. After graduating with a degree in Graphic and Interactive Design from Tyler School of Art, she worked for Headcase Design in Philadelphia and was Senior Designer at Louise Fili Ltd. After two and a half years, she left to further her freelance career and has also become well known for her side projects including Daily Drop Cap and the micro-sites, Mom This is How Twitter Works, Should I Work for Free?, and Don’t Fear the Internet, a collaborative project with [her husband] Russ.

Jessica’s clients include Wes Anderson, Tiffany & Co., the New York Times, Penguin Books, Target, Leo Burnett, and Wired Magazine. She’s been named a Print Magazine New Visual Artist (20 under 30), one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Design, and an ADC Young Gun. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club Board of Directors.

Let’s take a look at some of her featured projects.

Jess & Rush Keepsake

This is a printed book based on their online wedding invitation, which is a crazy parallax web site.

Mail Chimp logo revision

I love the details that went into the revision to make the letters more legible at small sizes.

CAA Friday Night Party

Here’s an elegant invitation based on theme of The Great Gatsby.

Minot Font

A display typeface to use used for special occasions such as wedding invites and baby announcements (minot means “child” in French).

Penguin Drop Caps

A series of twenty-six collectible hardcover editions of fine works of literature. Each cover featured a letter illustrated by Jessica.

Moonrise Kingdom

Jessica worked directly with director Wes Anderson on his recent film titled Moonrise Kingdom. Initially she was hired to create 20 credits in the beginning of the movie and a typeface to be used for the end credits. She ended up creating two fonts—a display and a text weight of the same typeface. “Working with Wes was an absolute dream” she said, “I was amazed and impressed at just how involved he is with every aspect of his films.”

Side projects

Aside from client work, Jessica creates side projects to exercise her creativities.

Thousand Under 90

Go ahead and give yourself an award.

Don’t fear of the Internet

A series of video that teaches HTML and CSS to none-web designers.

Quotes & Accents

A brief, useful guide of how to create smart quotes and dashes.

The Daily Drop Cap

A little side project that made a big impact on her career. She illustrated a letter a day and posted them online. The site received more than 100,000 visitors per month.

About Her Site

Her visual design skill alone is incredible and yet what I admired about Jessica is that she also teaches herself coding to build her own web site. In addition to learning HTML and CSS, she also learned CMS. With her recent redesign, she moved off WordPress and rebuilt her site with Kirby, which is a static file generator. I read about Kirby from following her work and played it with a bit. I am using it on a small client project and quite impressed with its lightweight, flexibility and security.

I am working on a due-over project for my class on professional design practices. After showing my portfolio, my professor suggested that I rework Sketches of Miles. I was not thrilled about the idea at first, but now I am loving it. I am not just redoing it, but make an extension of it. I’ll share the project once I am done, but working on it gives me the reason to re-listen to Miles. I also reread Greg Tate’s essays on electric Miles. That man is simply a brilliant critic. I am rereading Richard Cook’s It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record. I am also intending to reread a few books on Miles when I get a chance. What can I say? I am officially a Miles freak who can’t get enough of Miles’ Voodoo.

I work at the George Mason University School of Law as a web services developer. I am responsible for everything that has to do with the web from visual design to front-end development to Linux administration. I also do freelance web design, but schoolwork has kept me too busy. I have tons of projects in my portfolio, but for the sake of time, I’ll focus on some of the works I have done in classes.

Vietjazz

For my graduate course on Brand Identity Design, I created my dream record company called Vietjazz. The goal was to produce and promote Vietnamese music with jazz flavor. An example would be to take a melodic Vietnamese ballad as a basic structure and improvise on it using jazz arrangement. The target audience is for Vietnamese listeners like myself who also love jazz.

We spent a significant amount of time on working and revising the logo. I came up with more than a hundred designs and ended up with this. The logo consists of eight vertical bars. The slight tilting and offsetting of each bar conveys dynamics. All the bars are in blue expect for the green accent on the letter “j” to signify syncopation. The logo is set in one of my favorite typefaces: Univers by Adrian Frutiger.

After the logo, we developed stationery, which included business card, letterhead and envelope. Then we get to choose three applications. I picked the vinyl cover, a mobile app and a web site.

The final assignment was my favorite project. We had to come up with the brand guide. While all of my classmates chose to do a book format, I chose to do it as a web site. My reason was that a web site is always available. In addition, if the big boss wants to make some changes to the brand, you don’t have to reprint the guide. You can download all of the brand assets right away. I also love all the details that go into the guide.

I learn a great deal in that class and Jake is the man. If you haven’t taken his class, I highly recommend it.

Color Blindness

For my previous seminar with Shanshan, we focused on storytelling. For the first project, the assignment was to use data to tell a story. I did a poster on color blindness. Accessibility is one of the things that I care deeply about web design. I want to make sure that web sites are accessible to everyone. Whether you have visual impairment or color blindness, you should be able to access the web and that’s the beauty of the web.

Somewhere in America

“Somewhere In America” was a fun project. The assignment was to tell a story based on literary piece. I picked Jay Z’s “Somewhere In America” because on the outer layer it’s a pop record, but Jay Z packed so much references underneath the lyrics. For example, the line about “Somewhere in America, Miley Cyrus is still twerkin’” has a racism reference in it. Hip-hop is inseparable because kids are living in it without knowing it.

Unitea

Unitea is a fictitious tea company I developed for the final project. The goal was to build a brand with a unique story. The concept behind Unitea is the playoff on the word “unity.” When we gather around drinking tea, we unite. Tea brings people together. To build a unique story for Unitea, I developed a campaign web site to inform our customers the five core principles we valued: clarity, connectivity, community, charity and creativity. I called them “The Five C’s of Unitea.”

This is a homework assignment for a course on Professional Design Practices

Where do you want to be in 1 year from now?

I want to be done or close to finish with my MA in graphic design. I want to learn as much as I could while I am still in school. As for my professional development, I want to more selective about the projects I am willing to take on. With a full-time job in place, I don’t need to take on any freelance gig that comes my way.

Where do you want to be in 5 years from now?

After getting my MA in graphic design, I want to teach a course at George Mason or community college on professional web design and development. I have a passion for teaching and sharing what I know. For my professional career, I want to establish my personal brand. I want to move away from client services. I want to create my own digital products. I don’t know what they are yet. I’ll put more thoughts into them after I am done with school.

Where do you want to be in 10 years from now?

I would like to have a part-time teaching job and focus on working for myself. If I won’t be in the field anymore, I’ll do something completely different like opening a nail salon or a Pho joint.

A short list of typographic resources. If you have suggestion, hit me up.

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Read this book if you haven’t. If you want more, check out my 10 Recommended Books on Typography.

Copy Paste Characters

Useful when you need to copy and paste quick HTML codes for a certain characters.

Five Simple Steps to Better Typography

Mark Boulton’s tips on measure, punctuation, ligatures, size and weight.

Modular Scale

Developed by my good friend Tim Brown, modular scale is a great tools for making harmonic headings.

PXtoEm

I use PXtoEm all the time to do calculations for responsive type and layout.

Smart Quotes for Smart People

Jason Santa Maria’s one-page guide to use smart quotes.

Typoguide

This little guide has useful keyboard shortcuts for things like quotes, apostrophes and dashes.

Upping Your Type Game

Jessica Hische’s detailed post on typography.

The Vietjazz Band is a presentation to engage employees. At Vietjazz, we specifically value these nine chops in our colleagues: improvisation, communication, teamwork, flexibility, spontaneous, innovation, honesty, passionate and reliability. To become part of the Vietjazz band, which means to be rewarded or promoted, a Vietjazz employee needs to demonstrate those nine skills.

For the execution, I chose a slide (PowerPoint) format for HR people to use in employee or recruiting presentation. The slides are made up of bold typography set on bright, upbeat colors. For each slide, I selected a serif typeface that communicates each skill set. I had tremendous fun doing research, coming up with the contents and designing the pieces. It’s another great learning experience for my course on Brand Identity Design (AVT 614). Check out the PDF presentation.

For my graduate course on Brand Identity Design (AVT 614), I came up with Vietjazz Records for my project. The reason is obvious. I am passionate about Vietnamese music and jazz and my goal is to connect and advance the two distinctive musical forces. The concept of Vietjazz had been on the back of my mind for a while and I have thought of creating a side project to highlight Vietnamese music sets in jazz arrangements. over the years, I have been collecting these type of tunes and I have over 100 tracks to listen to whenever I am on the road for a long trip.

What piqued my interest in Vietjazz was the first time I heard Tùng Dương’s debut Chạy Chốn. Both the bossa-nova flavor on title track and the country-blues feel on “Trăng Khát” hypnotized me. The way Tùng Dương bent the notes, changed the phrasing and played with the syncopation to get the Vietnamese lyrics to mesh with the jazz sound were quite inventive. On top of that, Trần Mạnh Hùng and Lê Minh Sơn played some of the best jazz and blues solos coming out of the Vietnamese music scene.

As a jazz fan with Vietnamese music in my blood, I love the marriage between the two distinctive musical landscapes and want to explore more in this direction. In my informal research, what I have learned is that most Vietnamese listeners aren’t familiar with the jazz sound. My goal for Vietjazz Records is to produce and promote Vietnamese music with jazz flavors. From signing artists to album concepts to art direction to distribution, Vietjazz will be involved in every aspect of crafting an experience.

Since the target is to reach Vietnamese listeners around the world, the web would be the best medium for the company. The web would give us the limitless possibility to create a true experience. Once the album is set to release, the customers would be able to get it immediate through our web site.

That was my pitch for Vietjazz and my professor approved the concept. During the course, I spent weeks developing the logo. I literally did a hundred variations before we came up with the final version. I am happy with the result. The logo consists of eight vertical bars, which could be interpreted as the piano keys. The slight tilting and offset of each bar conveys spontaneity. All the bars are in blue expect for the green accent on the letter “j” to signify syncopation.

After the logo, the next assignment was to develop the stationery, which included business card, letterhead and envelope. Designing and developing the three applications for the brand were the most fun part of the project. I chose the web site, the mobile app and the vinyl album cover for Vietjazz. Designing the vinyl cover were the most challenging one. I had to paid Goodwill a visit to see a a vinyl record were designed.

Even though I had a blast designing the applications, my favorite assignment for the course was the development of the brand guidelines, which was our final project. I had never done a branding guide before; therefore, I loved the new challenge and I could also pull everything together for a portfolio piece. While all of my classmates chose to do a book, I convinced my professor to let me do a web site. The reason was that my company is primarily online; therefore, it makes much more sense to go with a web version. In addition, the brand guidelines are constantly changing; therefore, the web could be much quicker to update and could save some trees. A third reason would be that people could download and use our logo and templates immediately.

I spent quite a bit of time researching big companies like Apple, Adobe and Facebook to see how they have created their brand guide. I also picked up some great tips from MailChimp and Squarespace. The Vietjazz Brand Guidelines turned out quite well. It’s responsive and intuitive. Even though I had spent quite sleepless nights working on it, I am very proud of the outcome.

The branding class is one of the best courses I have taken at George Mason. The professor is awesome. He has real world experience and his critiques were very constructive most of the time. From our interaction in class, he values simplicity and he is a typographic geek. One of the things that I learned from him in this class is that every design decision has to have a reason. You can’t just pick a color or a typeface simply because it looks right or feels right to you. Especially for a brand, you have to have a reason for it like Tiffany has its distinctive blue, Coca Cola has its red and Starbucks has its green. Overall, this semester has been quite rewarding for me even though I had my moments of stress and anxiety.

Without further ado, I am proud to present the Vietjazz brand guidelines.

Unitea is a fictitious tea company I developed for the final project of my graduate design seminar. The goal was to build a brand with a unique story. The concept behind Unitea is the playoff on the word “unity.” When we gather around drinking tea, we unite. Tea brings people together. In Vietnamese tradition, a marriage between two individual is started with tea. I can still recall the day I served tea to my in-laws to ask them permission to married their daughter.

The story of Unitea is that we’re passionate about pure, organic tea and the inspiration for the company came from our grandfather whose expertise taught us the art of growing and drinking tea. He used tea to serve, connect and unite his community and we want to take that approach in a much larger scale.

For the project, I designed a clean, classy logo using Baskerville typeface with the three leaves on the dot of the letter “i” to signify unity. To build a unique story about our brand, I developed a campaign web site to inform our customers the things that we care most about. The intention of the web site is to highlight the five core principles of our brand: clarity, connectivity, community, charity and creativity. I called them “The Five C’s of Unitea.”

One of the most challenging parts of the project has to be coming up with the writing for each individual component. I had to do quite a bit of research. Even though I am not a great writer, I enjoyed the writing process as much as the design process. Unitea is one of those class projects that turn into a portfolio showcase.