Vassar’s Department of Dance is reinvigorated with the power of minimalism. After assigned with the project, I went through the photo collection and awed by the dancers’ motion. I selected a few striking shots, knocked out the background, and laid out the homepage in an hour. The director of web development (my boss) once asked me, “How do you design so fast and still churn out quality works?” My reply was, “I know when to stop.” Through my experience, I find that the more I refine a design, the worse it gets. And in my refinement process, I tend to throw in more unnecessary elements; therefore, I just stop and trust my instincts when I feel I have accomplished my goal.

On the homepage, I wanted to showcase the strength and liveliness of the dance program. Flash was used to pull up random images and for the transitions to give a sense of rhythm. The dark grey background was chosen to increase the dramatic of the body movements. In the interior pages, I wanted to maintain the strong visual by incorporate images with type in the header but also allowing readability by turning the background to white.

I took a different approach on this project by coming up with the design before knowing what the clients (department’s represented faculties) have in mind. So in our initial meeting, I presented my design and their jaws dropped. They were pleased with the design as much as I do; therefore, the project flew through smoothly. The only section I haven’t been able to touch on is VRDT because other urgent priorities took over. Still, I am happy with the outcome.

Vassar’s Music Library has relaunched. I can’t take the credit for the entire design concept because the project was handed to me from a former designer. However, I revamped most of the visual elements and arrangements including the background graphical treatment, and coded the site. I also streamlined the navigation and reorganized the structure in order to “eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Hans Hofmann.

By the way, don’t forget to drop by the graphics department to check out some of the recent banners I’ve done for 2006.

Last year the creative folks at Ao Trang contracted me to do a Flash presentation to showcase their white-dress photography. I browsed through the collection and was impressed with the aesthetic visual Hoai Nam has captured, especially with the focus on the sensuous body’s form. The silky-smooth ao dai flows like streams of poetry around the curvaceous figures. What sets Ao Trang’s work apart is how the simple, plain and traditional ao dai could produce such a pure, expressive and modern Vietnamese’s beauty.

Although I couldn’t take on a freelance work at that time, I always had the project in the back of my mind. So when the time is right, I contacted Ao Trang’s staff for the photos and offered a collaborative effort instead of a business deal so that we both hit the same goal, to display Vietnamese white-dress—one of our essential, cultural costumes.

After sorting through the exquisite set of photos, I needed a song that has both traditional and contemporary vibes in order to support the graphics. Went through my extensive collection and the track that jumps out at me is Thuy Tien’s “A Oi” from her Ngot & Dang album. The fusion of Vietnamese folk poetry and ambient futuristic sound, which gave the song an organic, eccentric flavor, is exactly what I was looking for. Thuy Tien’s idiosyncratic delivery added a rich, lyrical texture to the images. The end result is quite interesting.

With no further introduction, Visualgui.com and AoTrang.com are proud to present our jointed project: “Ao Dai Trang A Oi.”

Inspired by Pham Quynh Anh’s “Bonjour Viet Nam” and striking shots of Viet Nam’s landscapes, I put together a slideshow for my personal pleasure. I have read the translation and understood Marc Lavoine’s lyrics; however, I was not interested in accommodating the content of the song. I just needed the melody to complement the gorgeous images; therefore, no film-de-Coppola or war graphics are included. Furthermore, I have always wanted to incorporate French music into one of my motion pieces, and this song is just perfect.

As for the magnificent photos, I found them over at Vietnamese Meetup forum. I knew one day I will find a good use for them; therefore, I saved the images and asked for the photographers’ credits. The only guy that knows the authors is Andy who posted the photos. Although I didn’t get the authors’ permission, Andy said, “Donny, feel free to use [them]. I’ll update you when I locate the author(s) of these stunning sets.” I am going to take his words for it and hopefully the authors will be cool with it too since I am only using the photos for my own reflections of my homeland and won’t make a penny out of them.

The new, hip, and edgy German Studies is now live on the Vassar Web after a long delay. Coming up with the design was one of the most challenging parts of the project. The department’s chair knows exactly what he wanted, and he would reject any layout that didn’t hit the mark. In doing so, he has pushed me to think harder and to be more focused. After many failed attempts, I decided to break out my conventional approach, and let the design drives the site. So when I came up with the crisp geometric look, the contrast between muted and bolded colors, the contemporary typography, and the unanticipated rollovers (English/German), he was thrilled. The look and feel is what he has envisioned the site to be.

On the technical note, the site is CSS driven and XHTML structured. The secondary pages are half scalable when changing the browsers’ text size. The German’s quotes appear on each page was adapted from Clarksco’s Random Quote Generator written in PHP. Many thanks to my colleague Megg Brown for content review and hooked the site up to Adobe Contribute for the German department to update information without ruin the codes and design.

Web site of Development Office is finally relaunched. New visual features include random Flash slideshows, color codes for each section and heavy use of photos. The new structure is XHTML 1.1 validated and the new presentation is CSS driven. Go on and check it out.

Almost two years in production, the new Infosite finally comes to life. Although I have contributed the look and feel (all three themes currently available), the harder parts belong to my colleagues. Megg Brown has done an incredible job of hammering out the backend development while Tim Brown comes on board and nails down the CSS segments. Glad to see the site is redesigned!

Susan Stein Shiva Theater is a small project that was passed on to me from Jacob Moses who is a student at Vassar; therefore, he deserves the credit for creating the logo. Since he did a great job, I just built a simple and straightforward layout based on his design. Although we don’t work directly with each other, it is still a collaborated effort.

Arts at Vassar and Palmer Gallery are two new featured mini-sites design.

The new Jewish Studies site has been re-launched with a fresh new face, XHTML markups, and CSS driven.

The design was challenging because I had no images to work with; therefore, I had to rely on typography to communicate the edgy look and feel that the program wanted to convey. I spent tremendous amount of time on playing with different type treatments. Thanks to the fascinating shapes of Hebrew letters, I was able to incorporate them into the navigation. I also wanted to give the site a sense of liveliness by providing a set of colors that are warm and elegant.

The redesigning of Jewish Studies website was a great learning experience. Though the process was much more than what I had expected, it was worth invested because the result is pleasing to both the client and myself.

Update:
The compliment below is from Jeffrey Kosmacher, Director of Media Relations at Vassar. I am sharing his words because he touches on the main points that I wanted to communicate with the Jewish Studies site. Thanks Jeff!

Donny,

I love your colorful and elegant use of the Hebrew alphabet, surely the most universal aspect of Judaism. It was also very clever how you tied together each key English word on the page to a corresponding Hebrew letter. For those of you who don’t read Hebrew, the sound each of those Hebrew letters makes corresponds to the first sound of the English word Donny connected them to.

There is one exception, because no one letter in Hebrew makes the “j” sound, but the design has a great solution: it uses the first letter in the Hebrew word for Jew/Jewish.

Mazel tov (couldn’t resist),

Jeff