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

Inspired by the aesthetic beauty of Vassar, this particular motion piece is filled with wonderful shots of its campus and students. Actually, I had this project in mind for a while but never get a chance to work on it until this past weekend and it only took me a few hours. I felt in love with the campus the first time I came for my job interview. Watch the slideshow and you’ll see why. Make sure to crank up your speakers. I don’t care if your boss is standing right next to you.

Disclaimer! Even though the piece is about Vassar, it has nothing to do with work. It’s only for my personal entertainment purpose but if you are considering going to Vassar, you might want to check it out. All images are used with permission from Vassar. Music produced by Tomoyasu Hotei, courtesy of IRc2 Corp. and Toshiba-EMI Ltd.

This is what you get when you put a group of creative minds together.

Design Inside is what we (designers of College Relations) have been picking out our brains for almost a year and sweating on for the past two weeks. It’s an exhibition showcases web sites, web banners, posters, brochures, books, magazines and other designs produced by the Office of College Relations. This is the image of the college. This is the art of communicating life at Vassar.

Design Inside was a learning experience for me since this is my first time working on an exhibition. It gave us an opportunity to collaborate and communicate closely between web and graphic designers. The best part was where each of our best skill was applied to the project. For example, Julia wrote our texts, George picked out the colors for the walls, Charlie designed the pedestals, Megg constructed a big sitemap, Chris created an interactive piece, and I used Flash for various banners display. As a result, everything comes together nicely.

If you don’t know, now you know.
Below is my brief biography written by Julia Van Devleder.

Donny Truong is a very visual guy, as you will see if you visit his personal website, VisualGUI.com. He’s apparently a punster, too, since G.U.I. also stands for Graphical User Interface.

Truong was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 12. He received his bachelor’s in Digital Arts and Multimedia Design at La Salle University in 2001, at which point the Office of College Relations scooped him right up.

Inspired by pure and elegant design, Truong says that “it’s sometimes not what you put in but what you take out…. I am obsessed with white space and breathing room.” Web designers often emphasize usability, and of course that’s important, Truong says. But he believes that aesthetically designed sites are easier to use than sites designed without attention to basic aesthetic principles.

In addition to his Vassar websites and his personal site, Truong designed and continues to develop iLoveNgocLan.com, a personal project to honor Ngoc Lan, a talented Vietnamese singer who has more than 600 songs to her credit. He also reads voraciously, watches movies, and writes reviews to hone his writing skills.

Actually? He ought to write restaurant reviews! Truong says he doesn’t cook, but he does eat. Check out his Blog for mouthwatering descriptions of some classic Vietnamese dishes.