I just jazzed up my professional portfolio website with variable fonts. Both Bild and Roslindale are designed by David Jonathan Ross and they are available at Font of the Month Club for discount prices.

I wanted to create a block of text and variable fonts make it easy to experiment in CSS. These days I design webpages exclusive in the browser. I keep playing around with different layouts and typefaces until I get the right feel for the design. That was how I came up with the design for Trịnh Công Sơn’s lyrics.

Designing with static comps, which I did for Thinkpoint, was a huge challenge. Even though the designer had given me the flexibility to design the way I saw fit, it was still difficult.

An old client has asked me to develop custom WordPress themes, but I turned her down. I have giving up on WordPress theming. Gutenberg had lost me. I can’t find any tutorial in which I can develop a theme from scratch. I would need to take a starter theme and run with it. The goal of Gutenberg is to make layout richer, but I see so much templated WordPress theme with a heavy baggage on performance. I still see lots of WordPress themes with common look and feel like full-screen photos, tiny text, boxes, gallery and so on.

I turned off the classic editor and switched to Gutenberg for this blog. It works fine. I just don’t have any block. That’s fine. I still want this site to remain as a blog and nothing fancy. I don’t care about rich content and photography. All I care about is typography. I want the editor to remain as simple as possible. It appears that Gutenberg has improved with the release of 5.2. As long as everything works as I expected, I am fine with using WordPress as it was intended for blogging. I hope that WordPress won’t abandon that.

Tôi không rõ lai lịch của album này. Càng không biết những ca sĩ trình bài nhưng chỉ nghe qua một lần là bị lôi cuốn ngay bởi những bài hoà âm mộc mạc và gần gũi. Chẳng hạn như ca khúc “Giọt mưa thu“ được phối qua những nhạc cụ gồm có dương cầm hoà quyện cùng dàn giây và sáo tạo ra một không khí buồn não nùng để hộ tống giọng soprano của Hồng Dịu đến những đoạn cao vút. Riêng cá nhân tôi thì tuyệt vời nhất là phần hoà âm jazz chậm cho “Nỗi lòng người đi.” Không biết nhạc sĩ nào mà thổi đàn saxo quá điêu luyện. Không chỉ phần solo nồng nàn mà còn nâng cao giọng hát trầm ấm của Lân Nhã. Nhạc phẩm “Kim” cũng được hoà âm với giai điệu say sưa của blues và swing qua phần song ca Trung Kiệt và Duyên Huyền. Khuya nay mời các bạn cùng thưởng thức album này với vài ly rượu chát. Cheers!

Walden’s book takes young readers on the journey of life through simple, lyrical writing. Here’s one of my favorite lines: “Behind the library bookshelves sit some curious little minds—there are many truths and answers that they have yet to find.” In addition, Richard Jones’s gorgeous illustration makes it a perfect gift for little curious minds. I know what to get for the next birthday party for my kids’ friends.

Dear sons,

I am sorry for all the yelling. I get frustrated every time you ignore my words. Bickering with your brothers is part of growing up, but it still drives me nuts. The beauty of being a kid is how quickly you move on without any emotional attachment. One minute you scream at each other, and yet five minutes later you play together again like best friends. When your mom and I fought, we didn’t talk to each other for days or weeks. I am making the change from watching you.

Even when I yelled at you, you still told me that you loved me or that you wanted me to be happy. You melted my heart and made me felt guilty all at once. I am not a perfect father, but I do my best. When you read this letter, I hope you will understand that my frustration stems from love.

I love waking up each morning and having breakfast together. I love hugging you and kissing you before dropping you off to school. I love accompanying you and your friends on field trips. Having school lunch with you takes me back to my childhood memories. Enjoying your mama’s cooking and playing at the playground have become activities I look forward to after work. I hope all of these simple yet treasurable moments we spent together outweighed the not-so-good times.

When we spend so much time together, joy and frictions are bound to happen. If I were to travel for work and only get to see you once in a while, I would be more doting. Thanks goodness, I don’t have to be in that situation. I had always yearned for quiet moments, and yet I missed all the craziness we had at home when I went away for a few days or a week. The grass is always greener on the other side.

If you learn to listen, I promise to be more patience. Let’s work together on that goal if you feel me.

Love,

Daddy.

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of Trịnh Công Sơn’s music. Every time I listened to any of his song, I would find a line or two that spoke to me. For a long time, I wanted to collect all of his songs with inspirational quotes on love, life, and death. In the past couple of weeks, I made that my side project.

I went through 244 songs and picked out 158. I left out songs with war-related lyrics. I put all 158 songs into one HTML file and pulled out quotes that I loved. After that I designed the page with HTML and CSS. My challenge was to pack as much text into a page. My goal was to create a newspaper design for the web.

At first I used CSS grid, but I could not get the songs to stack up against each other like the Masonry layout. Then I switched to CSS Flexbox so that I could fill as many columns as I could on big screen monitors. Still Flexbox didn’t solve the issue of blank spaces between the rows. My last resort was CSS Multi-column. Although Multi-column solved the gap-row issue, it would break up the text in the middle of each song. Fortunately, break-inside: avoid; did the trick.

My intention for this project was that readers would skim the big pull quotes. Once they find something that they like, they can stop and read the entire lyrics.

To make the design more exciting, I dialed up the typography quite a bit. As a member of the Font of the Month Club, I have access to all the playful fonts designed by David Jonathan Ross; therefore, I might as well put them to use. The body text is anchored in Fern, one of my favorite reading text faces. The title of each song is set in Dattilo DJR. The quotes are set in various fun faces. They are loaded in random with a jQuery script written by Ngô Thiên Bảo. I also added in a dark mode switcher and the ability to turn off the pull quotes to make the layout less busy.

Initially this project was created for myself, but it also showcases Vietnamese fonts. As a result, I put it on Vietnamese Typography. Even if you don’t understand Vietnamese, you still can enjoy the beautiful typography. Take a look.

Since Vương was born, I used Facebook primarily to share my kids’ photos with family and friends. Although I had the app installed on my phone, I hid it along with a bunch of Apple’s native apps I never use but can’t delete. That way I didn’t have to open it, but I could still effortlessly share photos to Facebook from Google Photos.

Because of its ease of use and the number of family members on the platform, Facebook had motivated me to take more photos of my kids. When they smiled or did something fun, I captured the moment and shared. It had created a wrong impression that I am a great dad. It was not my intention to create this lie. I had my fair of frustrations as a parent, but those moments had never been captured. I yelled at my kids at times when they didn’t listen. In just the past few weeks, I received two emails from Đán’s teachers complaining about him ignoring their instructions. From banning from the iPad to talking to him about the consequences to making him promised, I did everything I could, but nothing went in his head. He continued to do what I asked him not to do.

Last night before bedtime, he fought with Xuân over a tiny stuffed animal when he had at least a dozen others. No matter what I said he insisted that he could not sleep without it. I made Xuân gave it back, which made him cried, and he left our room to sleep with his grandma. After Xuân left, he wanted me to hold him, but I refused. I told him to hold his stuffed animal since he loved so much. He started to cry and begged me to hold him, but I still didn’t budge. He left the room to sleep with his mom. With four kids, my mother-in-law, and now my brother-in-law’s wife, our four bedrooms are getting crowded. Sharing a bed with Đán and Xuân had been a nightmare. They constantly got on each other’s nerves, then they got on mine.

After they both screamed and left, I felt bad as well. My sleepiness was fucked up. The guilt of being a shitty parent made me deactivated my Facebook and deleted the app off my phone again. I couldn’t stand my own falsehood I had created on Facebook. With blogging, I am being honest with myself. I write more about my struggles than the perfect dad that I am not. No one here to judge me, or at least I don’t hear anything.

When my father-in-law was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, his oncologist informed him that he had six months to live. I was in the room with him and would never forget the shock on his face. As he lived his last months, I wondered what went through his mind, but I was afraid to ask. I did not know if he were comfortable to talk about it. Unlike my father-in-law, Julie Yip-Williams opened up about her metastatic colon cancer and revealed intimate details of her life as she faced her death. She accepted her faith and spent her last days planning for the future of her daughters and husband. She wanted to make sure they will be taken care of without her.

In addition to her terminal illness, Julie shared her extraordinary story. When Julie was born in Vietnam with congenital cataracts, her grandmother decided to let her go in her sleep because she didn’t wanted her granddaughter to go through life being blind. Julie escaped her first death and fled the country on a boat when the communist took over. Although she was legally blind, Julie proved that she was capable of doing anything. She graduated from Williams and Harvard, traveled the world, and raised a wonderful family. Although cancer shortened her life, she lived every moment of her limited time. She was strong, compassionate, and brutally honest.

What struck the chord with me is not how long you live but the quality of your life. I can’t take my time on this earth for granted. Life is too damn short, and I don’t know what will happen to me tomorrow. Through her own story, particularly her relationship with her daughters, she reminded me to love and to spend time with my kids while I still can and do not wait before it is too late. It’s a tear-jerking, gripping, and inspiring memoir that will have a long-lasting impact on me.

I haven’t blogged much this week because I have been busy working on a personal project. It’s one of the things that I had on my mind for a while and I just want to do it. It takes lots of time and it may seem like a waste of time, but I am passionate about it. If nothing else, it keeps me being creative and away from the news.

It feels great to get out of the political loops. I have not read the news or listen to podcasts on politics, except for “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Bill is more entertainment than politics. I feel much better not knowing and hearing about the current president. His words and tweets no longer having an effect on me.

Life is going well. I spend as much time with the kids as I can. My youngest is already seven months. He is growing everyday. I enjoy taking him out on the stroller before I go to work and in the evening after dinner. It is a bit nostalgic to realize that he will be our last baby. I still can’t believe that we have four boys, but I am so glad that we do. They are such a blessing and they brought so much dynamic to our family. Most days our house is loud and chaotic. When I go away, however, I miss all those noises. It will be sucked when the all go away for college and might not even come back to live with us.

I have been trying to live a simple, stress-free lifestyle. I appreciate what I have and stay calm. Life is too damn short and I can’t predict the future. I just have to live for today. It doesn’t mean I have to travel far, take expensive vacation, spend on things I don’t need to. I just want to enjoy life with what I have and where I live. I love spending time with my family. I enjoy reading and blogging. I get to make love every now and then. I treasure every second of it. Life is treating well.

I try not to focus on negativity. Not seeing my mom as often as I should is the only thing that make me sad. I still call her every and trying to see her as much as I can. That’s it for now. I’ll resume blogging after I finish up my little project.

My friend Jim Van Meer started Thinkpoint Creative, the intersection of design thinking and design doing. I am proud to be part of the talented team as Web & UI/UX Director. We just launched the website. Read more about it on my professional portfolio.

Web design has become boring in the last few years because most websites have similar layout. Andy Clarke sets out to change that by bringing art direction to the web. Andy spent the first two-thirds of the book explaining the concept of art-directing design, which includes grid-based layouts, typography, and photography. In the final quarter of the book, Andy walks through layout techniques using CSS Grid, Flexbox, Multi-column, and Shapes.

As stated in the beginning of the book, art direction is not new. Advertising and print publications, especially magazines, has been using art-directing design for more than 100 years. The web is only starting to get around to it. If you want to make memorable web experiences, this book is a good start.