HaH! Chili is founded by my wife Dana Nguyễn and Donny Trương. We love chili sauce that adds a kick to our dishes. We made small patches of chili sauce to share with our friends and family members. Now we would like to share them with you.

I can’t remember when I started to add chili sauce into every meal, but nowadays a meal wouldn’t be complete without it. I tried almost every chili sauce on the shelf at the supermarket. Most of them were not spicy at all and some of them were too spicy. All of them included preservatives. As a result, they lost their freshness.

When I came to America 34 years ago, I always had to have Huy Fong’s Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce with my phở. A few years ago when the Sriracha shortage happened, its price spiked. Dana Nguyễn, my wife, decided to make her own chili sauce with all the peppers she harvested from our little garden. When she asked me to try it, I was hooked. I loved the pure, fresh taste with a kick that enhanced every dish, including phở. I haven’t turned back to Huy Fong’s Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce since.

At every party I went to, I brought out my wife’s chili sauce to introduce to family and friends. They were hooked as well and requested for more. In the last few years, my wife refined her craft of making chili sauce. She sourced all of the peppers from her sister’s garden. She made small patches to share with our family and friends. I asked her, “Why don’t we share our chili sauce with the world?”

She just needs to focus on making the chili sauce and I will take care of the brand, the design, and, of course, the website. That’s how HaH! Chili is founded. It’s our partnership and passion for something that we love.

HaH! has a surprised, joyful expression. Our chili sauce will make you go “HaH!”. The hidden meaning is that our chili sauce is Hot as Hell! You’ll find out when you give it a try. Once we established the name for our chili sauce, the first thing I did was designing the bottle label. I wanted the label to be as simple as possible. The label only consists of the wordmark, the name of the product, and the web address. I want to keep all the product information on our website.

For our branding wordmark, I didn’t have to try out any typefaces. I already had in mind the NaN Rage superfamily, designed by the NaN team (Hugues Gentile, Fanny Hamelin, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, Florian Runge, Jolana Sýkorová). The logo is set in Nan Rage Zipp. The product names and headers are set in NaN Rage Quik. The copy and body text are set in NaN Rage Soft. I just loved the flexibility the eccentricity the NaN Rage superfamily offered.

Take a look at our brand new HaH! Chili website and treat yourself a bottle of two of our Hot as Hell! chili sauce. Our supply is limited. So grab them while they are still fresh.

TJ is a dear friend of mine and an exceptional contractor who runs his own home-improvement business. He takes pride in getting things right and on time. He has a solid work ethic and the results of his outcomes speak for themselves. He transforms old places into dream spaces for his clients.

He showed me his projects on his phone and I suggested that he needed to put them on his website. He had a website, but it was outdated and he didn’t bother to renew it. His website went offline in May 2024 and I offered to reinvigorate it, but he declined. Then suddenly, several weeks ago, he took up my offer. Similar to what he had done for his clients’ homes, I gave his digital home a new life.

The goal for the website is to show off his projects. The homepage features a responsive slideshow that displays two sets of images. On small screens, only vertical photos are displayed. On large screens, only horizontal photos are displayed. This method, which uses the HTML Picture element, solves the issue of tiny landscape photos on small screens or large portrait photos on large screens.

For the showroom section, all photos are displayed for potential clients to scroll through at their own leisure to see how TJ helped his clients reimagine their dream homes—together.

One of his recent clients had written a genuine review of the project they worked on together. She even took photos, which look professional. To show their fruitful collaborative effort, I put together a page. It was indeed, “A Dream Kitchen Realized.”

TJ Home Improvements website is typeset in Colophon Foundry’s DM Sans, which was based on Indian Type Foundry’s Poppins, designed by Jonny Pinhorn. DM Sans is a low-contrast geometric sans serif family with a simple, modern vibe.

TJ wanted to keep his original logo, which he created himself, but he handed me a low-quantity JPG file. I redrew it based on a grid system and reset the type using Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger.

TJ is thrilled with his new website. Even though he lands most of his contracts through word of mouth, the website showcases his body of work. If you live in the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) area and would like to remodel your home, I highly recommend TJ Home Improvements. Don’t take my words for it, just take a look at the TJ Home Improvements website.

In the last couple of days, I spent some times revising the look and feel for the Law Library’s LibGuides. I put in custom CSS rules to override Springshare’s default styles so that the page has a bit of our brand elements. I also made sure the colors passed accessibility test. It was a nice, little project.

Introducing a brand new visual identity for the Institute for Consumer Financial Choice at Antonin Scalia Law School. Typeset in Nickel Gothic Variable, designed by David Jonathan Ross.

A newly refreshed brand identity for Simplexpression is typeset in NaN Druid and NaN Druid Sans, designed by Anna Khorash and Reymund Schröder.

Simplexpression, a small jewelry design studio based in Fairfax, Virginia, is created by Dana Nguyễn. With her background in chemical engineering and her passion for design, Ms. Nguyễn strikes the balance between structural precision and natural beauty to elevate her craft in jewelry design. Her love for organic shapes and pure colors, both in her work and in her life, presents a simple expression on any occasion.

Visual identity for InBalance, Antonin Scalia Law School’s health and well-being initiative. As part of the initiative, the law school hosts various programs and posts helpful information that supports law student well-being. Typeset in Nickel Gothic, designed by David Jonathan Ross.

Brand identity for the National Security Institute at Antonin Scalia Law School. Typeset in League Gothic, designed by Tyler Finck, Caroline Hadilaksono, and Micah Rich. Even though this is not the official logo for NSI, I like to keep it for my portfolio.

A few years ago, my mother’s youngest sister shared with me stories she had written about her parents, sisters, and brother. She wrote about their lives in great detail and her narrative came from her heart and memory. The stories helped me understand their legacies; therefore, I asked her permission to preserve them in online book format so we can share them with the younger generations. I edited her stories in Vietnamese and English. I put the website together. I also came up with the book title. Familý was a play on my mother’s family name: Lý. For the visual identity, I pulled together NaN Serf and its sibling NaN Serf Sans, designed by Daria Cohen, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, and Florian Runge.

My father was a builder. When I was a kid, he took me on the roads to watch him built houses, temples, and theaters with his crew. In his tribute wordmark, Hồ Hữu Tỷ (his name) fit together like a building block. I love the way squares and circles are built together to make up Megazoid, designed by David Jonathan Ross.

Yesterday, I decided to rework and refine the wordmark for Scalia Law’s Career & Academic Services. It is set in Acumin Variable, designed by Robert Slimbach, to give give a nice and balanced text block. The colors came from Scalia Law’s branding.