I used to be terrified when I had to go to job interviews. In the early days of my career, I couldn’t land on many jobs because I screwed up my interviews.

Right off college, my goal was to work at Millersville University as a webmaster. The University was closed to my mom’s house and I had always liked the environment. When the position was posted, I applied immediately and I was so anxious about the interview that I couldn’t sleep the night before. I chugged down two bottles of Heineken to help me too sleep, but I couldn’t.

The next day, I was so nervous that I basically fucked up the entire interview. I couldn’t answer questions like how would you resolve a conflict with a coworker, how would I supervise student workers and what do I see myself in five years. My work and my portfolio were not even mentioned.

I hated myself and I blamed on my poor English for the screw up. Then again, I knew that I was not going to get away with this if I want to land a job. So I made it my priority to practice this skill and there’s nothing better to do it then to go on interviews. Once I pulled together my portfolio, I applied to many jobs that were related to web design as possible so that I could get an interview. Even when I had a job, I would go on to interviews just to practice.

Today I can confidently say that I have 80% chance of landing on a job I applied for with only three rules.
My first rule is to dress to impress. You could never be over-dressed in an interview. I always dressed to an interview like I go to a wedding. Truth be told, I only have one suite; therefore, I wear it to any formal occasion.

My second rule is to take control of the interview. I think of an interview as an opportunity to share my passion for what I do. Most family members and friends do not care what I do; therefore, I rarely get an opportunity to talk about about the things that get me out of bed every morning. I might never see the interviewers again, but I get to tell them that I eat, drink and live this shit everyday. In addition to showing my client works, I try to bring in my personal projects like Sketches of Miles, Simplexpression and even my involvement with Thirsty.

My third rule is to be honest. Not everyone could do everything. When I applied for my current position, I told my supervisor that I didn’t have any Linux or server admin experience, but that I am willing to learn. She trusted me. To not let her down, I picked up Linux books to learn before I even started the job. Now I am so glad that I did and that she gave me the opportunity.

I don’t get to sit on the other side of the table too often, but there was an interview that I could never forget. I still remember the day we interviewed Kevin for the web design position at Vassar college. He made such an impact on me that I couldn’t care for anyone else after him. He talked about design and how it reflected his own life. He used to be depressed and design gave him a way out. His exact words were: “Design makes life more beautiful.” I was sold.

If one thing I learned from my professor in my Advanced Typography class, it has to be widow. Every time he saw a widow in our paragraph, he would cross it out with his black pen. While widow is easier to control on a printed page, it is much harder to do on the web because you do not have control of how your texts would be filled into the visitor’s device. I have looked at many of my favorite sites and I see widows everywhere.

Out of curiosity, I tweeted my boy Tim Brown to see if he has any suggestion and he pointed me to the Widow Tamer. I actually heard of it in the past, but was not interested simply because it requires JavaScript. My practice has always been to avoid using JavaScript as much as possible unless I absolutely have to. I looked into CSS solution, but it is not being widely supported yet. So I had a bit of a dilemma. Should I have widows and no js or should a have a bit of js and no more widow. I went with the latter for now simply because I want to avoid widow. The js file is actually fairly tiny so it doesn’t do much harm to the overall performance. Maybe I can replace it with CSS in the future.

I still don’t own an iPad. I was going to get the Mini as my first reading device, but I changed my mind after checking it out at the Apple store. The reason is simply no retina display. Comparing the Mini and the fourth generation is a huge different.

I pulled up this site simply to check out the type and the fourth generation is simply stunning. Because I wanted the iPad to be my reading device, clean and crisp type is very important. Without the retina just doesn’t cut it. Maybe I should just wait for the next Mini release. I wouldn’t mind one of those MacPro laptops though.

When I was still at Vassar College I had the opportunity to worked with a group of talented web designers and front-end developers. Almost on a daily basis, we collaborated on projects and shared best practices on web design. Although Tim and I have moved on, we still keep in touch with the group to share our knowledge and to keep everyone up-to-date.

Since keeping up with best practices is what we do everyday and we’re no longer in the same building, it makes sense that we have a place where we could collaborate. As a result, we launched Web Design Best Practices (WDBP). Mad kudos to Chris and Ray (the two still at Vassar) for putting the site together. I haven’t contribute much simply because I am still overwhelmed with work and homework, but I am very excited to have a resource that I can use and contribute.

The new CSS-Tricks is laced with negative feedback. One commenter went as far as, “I hate this new version. It makes me sick. v9 was way much better.” Many commenters have the audacity to demand bringing back the previous version. These kinds of trolls don’t make me miss closing down comment on this site at all.

CSS-Tricks isn’t the only one that gets these kinds of nastiness. Earlier this year George Mason relaunched its new homepage and people went as far as creating a petition to “Revert gmu.edu to the previous design.” While I had nothing to do with the GMU homepage, I redesigned the George Mason Law web site around the same time. Fortunately most comments were positive, but there was one that wanted to revert back to the previous design.

Rather than providing constructive criticisms on how to improve the new design, people want to go back to what they are used to seeing. That kind of design criticism isn’t helping at all.

In my web work, I don’t spend too much time in Adobe Illustrator. I only used Illustrator when I needed simple vector graphics. In the past two weeks, I spent quite a bit of time in Illustrator for my Advanced Typography class. The first assignment is to redesign a movie poster with 90% type and 10% illustration. Even though I can’t draw to save my life, I love working in Illustrator. The image trace feature is god-sent. The type looks so much better in Illustrator than Photoshop. By the way, I am now rocking with CS6. Although I haven’t discovered anything new, I just like it, especially Illustrator. I am now more comfortable with Illustrator and I can see why designers love it so much.

The next assignment will be designing a restaurant menu. I am going to use that opportunity to get comfortable with InDesign. In my experience, I learn much quicker when I have a real project to work on. For example, I read so much about MODX, but I learned so much more by using it on a real project. I hope to reveal it soon once my client gets moving.

As much as I like to attend social events like Refresh DC, I had a parental dilemma. Should I go or not? I would feel guilty for leaving the two boys with my wife, especially if the event wouldn’t turn out so great. Tonight with Steph Hay holding down nclud studio, however, the time away from the boys was worth it. She was quite an energetic and engaging speaker. Her message was clear and strong: “Trust makes users happy.” Set realistic expectations and meet them. You don’t have to be the best. You just have to be real. You rock, Steph!

In the initial meeting with my client for a freelance project I having been working on for five months, I knew immediately that he needs a content strategist and I knew exactly who to recommend right on the spot. She’s a fantastic writer who I had the pleasure of working closely with at GW School of Business. Although we both moved on, I knew someday we would work together again and here we are.

We both worked together to plan out the the sitemap and the content of the site and presented to the client. Once we got the approval she worked directly with the client to get the contents while I concentrate on the design and the content management system. I show her my design for feedback and she provided me contents to plug in before we let the client see the site coming together. Because she’s a great writer, she makes the content sounded informative and very engaging. The only thing that I had to work with her on is trimming down the blurbs. On the web, less is more.

Other than that, she’s doing an outstanding job of getting the contents from the client. As a designer, content has always been the most important part of the project for me because content drives my design, but I am actually happier to let someone else taking on that roll. From now on, I will pitch for a content strategist with all new projects.

Back in 2004 when I set out to learn WordPress, I created a custom theme for Visualgui from scratch. I took WordPress’s classic theme, ripped apart and kept only the codes I needed for my site. I had total control of my markups and I knew exactly what to expect when WordPress processed my codes. I also decided very early on that my blog posts would only contain texts and nothing else (no images, no embedded video, audio or JavaScripts).

What still amazes me about WordPress is that the custom theme still works today. The markups had changed dramatically over the years from XHTML to HTML5, but the underneath structure remains the same. Another indisputable feature of WordPress is the one-click upgrade. My site has never been broken when I make the upgrade. I even tell all my clients with confidence to just click that button.

The downside of WordPress is that it takes a lot of work to build from scratch, especially if you don’t know exactly what functionalities will be used in the future. Take this site for example, I have no functionality for widgets because I don’t need them. My clients, however, would need those types of feature to be able to add extra things to their site.

A better approach would be to take pre-existing templates like The _s Theme, Toolbox or Twenty Eleven and customize them for your needs. The drawback is that you’re losing precise control of your markups and many functionalities that came with those themes you might not need. Working from complexity to simplicity is where WordPress is similar to Drupal. The different is that WordPress’s default markup doesn’t make Zeldman cries. In this regard, MODX shines because it gives you total freedom to write your markups.

I am working on a client site using the latest version of MODX and I couldn’t agree more with the president and co-founder of MODX Ryan Thrash on “Remarkable Results, No Coding Required:”

We have always believed that the software that runs your website shouldn’t dictate its structure or force you to compromise your design to fit its mandatory theme layer. On the other hand, it should adapt to your explicit needs, today or tomorrow, and it should never force you to work with code in order to create a truly custom design.

That is the reason I picked MODX and am so excited about its flexibility.