While riding the bus to work yesterday, the idea struck. As soon as I arrived into my office, shot an email over to Ao Trang requesting for the photos from the 2008 calendar. Like always, the PR guy was very fast in responding to me (Thanks, you guys rock). The music has been on the back of my mind for quite a while now. I was just waiting for the right images. Without further to say, here is Tinh Hoai Huong.
The fresh new site for the Office for Fellowships and Preprofessioanl Advising kicks off my first design for 2008, but also marks my last work for Vassar. I hope there will be room for freelance project in the future.
The new design for Vassar College Department of Music has rolled out earlier than intended schedule due to the first live webcast of Vassar College Choir on Friday. In addition to designing the look and feel, I had a chance to work on a real project with Cascade Server (Vassar’s newly implemented CMS). My colleague Megg Brown has been a tremendous help with the CMS as well as in making the site possible to go live.
Individuality is part of Vassar’s identity. We pride ourselves in being unique; therefore, our public face (the homepage) displayed its distinctiveness almost every day. (You can still browse through the collection of banners I have created since my first day at Vassar in the department of graphics). Even though we still love our previous approach, and I will miss designing those banners, we need to step up our game. The challenge is how to top ourselves by moving forward and still keep what we love.
With that kind of challenge, it takes a dedicated team to tackle. Through thorough research (which includes looking at hundreds of colleges’ homepage), careful evaluation, and endless discussion, we came up with a solid design that would give us flexibilities and still be able to remain unique. In other words, we based our design around a central location, which housed easy-to-access information. As long as we keep the essential element in the same position, the sky is the limit.
As part of the team, my main responsibility is designing the layout, and one of the things that still strike me the most about Vassar is the beautiful campus from outside landscapes to inside architectures. Instead of just showing small, quick-to-load photo, I want to make it big and part of the design. On the new site, I used a detailed shot of the Students’ Building to give a vibe of the place where students gathered for lectures, parties, or just to chill out. But using a beauty shot is just one approach. A wide range of styles will be revealed as we move into this new direction.
So what has been changed? We don’t get to design banners on a daily basis anymore, but we get to focus more on the entire web page. So without further delay, allow me to introduce to you our new homepage, and you could read the official statement about our new design. We also revamped the secondary pages for a crisp, clean and simple look and feel. My kudos goes out to the web team. It was an amazing experience working with a group of talented individuals who had brought their expertise to the table. You guys rock!
My latest design for the Vassar Farm, a concise, informational site, just went live. I am glad they let me kept the little girl. Isn’t she adorable?
I’ve also been working with the web team to redesign the Vassar homepage, which should launch at the end of the month. It’s going to be mad wicked!
In order to get the Web site realign and ready for the Class of 2007 Commencement, I was assigned to work with my colleague Tim Brown, and it turned out to be a great collaborative effort. I worked with Tim before, but never on a one-on-one partnership like this.
Our challenge was to meet the tight deadline, which was a week. So we had to work together off the same site on the same server and at the same time without overwriting each other’s work. To do so, we not only had divided up the pages, but also alternated our tasks. So if he worked on CSS, I worked on HTML and we switched up like a tag team.
As a result, we were able to accomplish our goal within three days. The new site is now easier to use as well as cleaner in codes. The content is much more organized and the visual layout is a bit enhanced. I am so glad that our boss had paired us up for this project. The experience was so effective that I am looking forward for more collaboration in the near future. You’re the man, Tim!
While I designed The Office of International Services Web site from scratch, Kevin gives The Office of International Programs a whole fresh new look.
The Learning and Teaching Center gets a brand new makeover. They wanted a site that is clean, hip, and fresh with some of the elements from Dean of Freshmen (also designed by yours truly). See if you could spot the designer in the photo. Enjoy the beautiful weekend, folks!
The redesign of Campus Life Office has just rolled off my G5. Fresh and clean is the key.
The spanking new Dean of Freshmen is now live. I chose upbeat colors to make it fresh for the freshmen, but the clean and elegance were also considered for the parents. In addition, I have used the photo on the homepage in a different direction. I originally had the photo appeared at the top, but its large size took up too much space above the fold. I didn’t want to reduce the graphic either because it would lose the effect was I was going for. As a result, I incorporated the image into the whole design by placing the attractive visual at the bottom. It’s a reward for those who scroll.