I drew the inspiration for this little redesign from rereading Marty Neumeier’s excellent The Brand Gap while on vacation. The entire book is set in large Helvetica with generous leading. It is surprisingly easy to read. At first, I was going for Acumin Pro, but instead I went with Hypatia Sans, designed by Thomas Phinney and Paul D. Hunt. I was not too fond of this eccentric typeface, geometric sans with humanist undertones, at first, but it grows on me. It has quite a bit of personality, which is not a typical choice for running text. This is a personal blog so why not?

In addition to the typeface, I brought back the sidebar to bring back the good old blog design. I have a hate and love relationship with the sidebar, but I am sticking with it for now. I also went back to pure white background with black text to simplify the design. I hope you enjoy this little redesign.

I am still enjoying myself at the the beautiful Siesta Key island. I’ll update this blog next week. Time to hit the beach.

I am excited to introduce Typographically Trịnh. This is an independent project that aims to highlight Vietnamese typography with my favorite quotes from Trịnh Công Sơn, whose philosophical lyrics I always find intriguing and inspiring.

My goal is simple. Each day I will pick out a quote to design with my own understanding and interpretation of his words. Take a look at the first four pieces I have created. Although Trịnh Công Sơn had written over 600 songs and I only found 244 songs, I will only select 100 quotes that speak to me the most. Why 100? I wanted to do #The100DayProject to help myself stayed creative. I also just want to build websites.

Although I have all the basic structure (HTML and CSS) set up, I won’t see myself creating the pages on a daily basis. I will take my time to fulfill the 100 designs I set out to do. The process will take longer, but I am OK with that. Even though this project has been in the back of my mind for a while, it is started to take shape only after I saw the redesign of Google Fonts. The new directory has a number of decent fonts that support Vietnamese characters. I will also use Typekit for this project.

I am so glad to see that my book on Vietnamese typography has been useful to type designers. I am hoping to see more typefaces that have support for the Vietnamese language. I hope that a project like Typographically Trịnh will motivate type designers to consider extending their fonts to support Vietnamese.

I have been touching up ON Designs a bit. The logo is now contained in a square box. The text face is now set in Arno Pro, another beautiful serif by Robert Slimbach. The large display heading is now set in Eloquent JF Pro by Jason Walcott.

I also wrote a new intro:

I’m Donny, a designer who omits needless designs.

I’ve been practicing simple designs since 1999. I honed my craft by reading William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White and listening to Miles Davis. While Strunk and White taught me the value of taking out unnecessary elements, Davis taught me the important of white space—what you leave out is as essential as what you put in. Learning from the masters of communication, I strive to create clear, honest, and meaningful connection between your product and your audience. Take a look at some of the projects I have worked on.

This site has gone through some minor changes again. I brought back the sidebar again on larger screens. I was not quite happy with the previous change. Without the sidebar, there is simply too much whitespace. The new change is inspired by the The Washington Post I picked up this morning when I dropped my kid off to daycare. I think I am satisfied with this version, but you never know. I may make more changes later on. The typography feels just right. The colors are muted enough. The sections of the layout are separated by gray lines. I hope you enjoy it before I change it again.

The new redesign lasted three days. Last night, I changed the design again. The sidebar feels cluttered; therefore, I went back to one column. In addition, I can’t seem to use sans serif for body text; therefore, I return to one of my reading faces Adobe Text Pro by Robert Slimbach. The color scheme stays the same.

I’ll continue to tweak and fine-tune it until I find something inspiring. That’s the beauty of having and designing your own site. Yesterday I read a fascinating article called, “The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens” by Elspeth Reeve. The sad thing is that these kids worked so hard to get a million followers and completely lost their site one day without a warning. Tumblr just shut down their blog. This is the biggest reason I don’t trust a third-party site with my content.

At the time when everyone wants to kill the sidebar, I am bringing it back with the 2016 redesign. After separating my professional work from my personal blog and launching my online portfolio, I am now focusing this site as my writing platform. I am no longer interested in posting on other places such as Medium, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

The first order of business for the redesign is to get rid of the navigation since I no longer needed it. The main focus is still on the readability of the articles, but I also played up the sidebar. Readers can find everything they need to know about me and my work right on the sidebar.

As far as the new design goes, I am once again returning to Swiss design. For the typeface, I am setting neo-grotesque Acumin Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach, on the entire site. I also wanted to move away from white background and play with pink.

For the backend, I am still rocking WordPress, but reducing my theme to just two files (index.php and CSS). For the layout, I am using flexbox for the columns instead of floats. I am loving flexbox.

That’s it. I hope you like the new change.

I am pleased to announce the launching of the web-based version of Thơ Mưa, a book with a collection of 39 Vietnamese poems written by doctor and poet Cao Nguyên. If you can read Vietnamese, check out the book’s web site. If you want to find out more about the web project, read the case study over at my portfolio site.

My portfolio site, ON Designs, gets an update. The major change is the expansion of each selected project. For each case study, I wanted to add more visual designs and incorporate the process that went into the project. Designing each case study is time-consuming and I had avoided in the past, but I believe it is worth the effort.

The new design reflects more of my design thinking. I wanted to experience with online editorial design and move away from the trend of hiding all the navigation items under the hamburger icon, even on the big desktop screens. I also wanted to do away with JavaScript. Except for loading TypeKit and Google Analytics, I use no JavaScript for interaction.

For the typography, I keep Acumin Pro for my logo and the big headers. I added Minion Pro for the text face. Both of these typefaces are designed by Robert Slimbach. Both of these typefaces are beautiful and elegant with subtle humanist qualities.

Finally I wanted to stay true to my philosophy: Omit Needless Designs.

In the past few months weighing the pros and cons, I have decided to separate my personal blog from my professional work. The decision is hard to make because Visualgui has become both my personal and professional presence on the web for so many years. On one hand, I still enjoy blogging and designing for the web. With everything in one place, it is easier for me to focus my attention. On the other hand, the blog is somewhat limiting my design decision because I wanted to support Vietnamese type. In addition, the blog is always about readability.

With my portfolio separated, I can use more type choices and play more with the design. With that said, allow me to introduce ON Designs, a brand new website that showcases only my work. The concept of ON Designs is played off Omit Needless Words inspired by inspired by William Strunk’s 17th principle of composition. ON (Omit Needless) Designs focuses on the necessity of the users. A user-centered experience should contain no unnecessary elements; therefore, every design decision needs to be thoughtful, simple, and intuitive.

Even though I have been working on this site in the past few weeks, I decided to changed the typeface to Acumin, a new design by Robert Slimbach, after seeing the announcement on Typekit yesterday. To stay true to the brand, Omit Needless Designs, I wanted to make the site as simple as possible. I invite you to visit my brand new site.

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.