This is a portfolio presentation for my final project in a class on professional design practices. I was not interviewed a for job at Big Spaceship.

Thank you for the opportunity to present my work. I have been a huge fan of Big Spaceship many years ago when Michael, the founder, came to Vassar to speak about his projects at the agency. I knew I wanted to work here one day.

To begin, I would like to share a fun app based on a project called Sketches of Miles. The intention of the app is to let users create their own artwork based on Miles Davis’s records. The app featured a straightforward, intuitive interface to let users play and share their sketches of Miles.

Vietjazz is a recording company I created for a branding class. The concept was to connect Vietnamese ballad with jazz. I designed the logo, stationery, and applications. I also developed a responsive web site for the brand guidelines.

For the movie poster, the goal was to redesign an existing piece using type and then redesign it again in the opposite genre. I selected Donnie Darko, which is a horror film. For the horror version, I chose Trajan Pro for its sharp serifs. For the comedy version, I chose the cherish Cooper Black.

The film ratings system is a redesign project to improve the visual information of the five major ratings. The new system uses visual progression to give viewers clear indication of each rating. I chose Adrian Frutiger’s Univers for its simplicity and legibility.

For motion design, I am interested in the storytelling aspect of it. Go the Fuck to Sleep is a story that I could relate to as a father of two toddlers. After hearing Samuel L. Jackson reading the story, I had to create a typographic motion piece based on his narration.

“Please Give Me” is a personal piece for me. Back when my wife and I were still dating, she sent me an article that talked about how the victims of Agent Orange, especially children, were forgotten. After reading the article, I wanted to create something to raise awareness of the forgotten victims. I reached out to photographer Justin Maxon, whose photos were featured in the article, to see if he would let me use his work to create a slideshow. He sent me a handful of hi-res images for me to use. For the music, I chose a particular singer not only because her emotional vocals, but because of her background. She grew up poor and has a facial disfigured because her family couldn’t effort the proper treatment. When she sang this song, I could feel that was living it. Let me give you a short translation of the lyrics:

Please give me mother’s embracing arms
Please let me hear the joyful sound of children’s footsteps
Please let my country has a peaceful sleep
I’ll love you from that moment on.
Please let me come back in one body
To let me hear nature’s songs
Please let me forget imprisonment
To let me be the bitter wine
Please give me the whole life
So one day when a child sings in his cradle
Please, just give me one day.

Ms. Geisel:

After some singing and dancing, the children sat quietly to listen to Ms. Geisel read, “Can I Play, Too?” A story about a little snake who wanted to play catch with his friend the elephant and piggy but had no arms to catch with! The children were so bummed each time the snake missed the ball, saying in unison, “He has no arms!” Dan seemed very concerned that the snake kept getting hit with the ball shouting, “Ouch! That hurt! Is snake ok?” It was great seeing our Hummingbirds’ empathic side shine through during the story.

A few words to describe student: Active, friendly, loving, curious, expressive.

Likes to play with: Dan loves anything that moves. Cars, trains, planes, and trucks. He likes to build tall towers using anything he can stack. Dan is also very social and always loves playing with his friends. He is very active and loves to jump, run, dance, and play with balls.

Child’s strength: Except during drop off time in the morning, Dan is a very happy little boy. He is very smart and vocal and especially loves to point different things out during story and circle time. he plays very nicely with his friends, especially during gym time and playground time. Dan is also very empathetic and quick to give hug and words of advice to any friend that is not feeling happy.

Areas we are working on: We’re trying to work on making drop off time a bit easier. Dan is making progress. Only a few minutes after mom and dad leave, he is ready to join his friends. Also, we have begun talking about when mom and dad come back. Sometimes, if he is teary during the day, we ask him “When do mommy and daddy come?” He says, “After nap.” And that usually calms him.

From yesterday’s daily activity report:

The Hummingbird class was in motion this morning! Dan, Daniel, Becca, Aaron, and Alexa all ran to the basket of trains as soon as we got to the classroom. We asked them where their trains were going… Dan scooted his train all around the circle table and said “He’s going to see Daddy.”

As soon as Ms. Geisel announced it was time for Show and Share, Liz turned to Ms. Ali with a great big smile on her face. Then, Dan stood up to tell the class that his “daddy got me new clothes.”

Dan has been extremely closed to me. He makes me feel loved and very special. His favorite bedtime book is The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. At first, he was a little scared, but now he loves reading it. He now weighs as much as his older brother. He has been talking a lot as well, but he has started to stutter when he tries to find the right words to say. For example the other day he saw a girl held a book, he told me, “Look daddy, look daddy, look daddy, look daddy, it’s Frozen.” I love this kid even though he is way too active for me.

I tweaked the design for this site again to make the logo smaller. I had fun making the logo humongous, but it was too big and took up way too much real estate. Using SVG for the logo without any fallback doesn’t sit quite well with me even though I could careless about IE8 and below.

With the new change, I replaced SVG logo with real typeface. For typography of the entire site, I replaced Roboto with Source Sans Pro. If you have Adobe products installed on your machine, I also changed body text to Minion Pro. I don’t have a subscription to TypeKit; therefore, the fallback for the body text is Source Sans Pro. My type choices are limited because I want the ability to display correct Vietnamese characters. Google Fonts only has a handful of typefaces that support Vietnamese subsets. I don’t even see Vietnamese listed under TypeKit’s language support.

One additional change on Visualgui is that the huge hero on the homepage is now gone. I have that feature for many years and grown tired of it. Text is the only thing on the homepage.

In its jazz-syncopated reinterpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” The Bad Plus created some of the wildest, oddest and most imaginative musical interactions between virtuosic piano (Ethan Iverson), propulsive bass (Reid Anderson) and chaotic drums (Dave King). The new sound might not sits well with pure classical heads, but it’s fascinating and adventurous for an open ear.

I Love Ngoc Lan received 140 copies of Ta Say, a collaboration between Ngọc Lan and Duy Quang. We then sells the CDs for $10 an album to raise money for the Ngọc Lan’s foundation, which helps poor and unfortunate children in Vietnam. Within a few days, we sold 100 copies to fans in Vietnam and someone in the forum suggested to use Viet Cargo for shipping.

My partner at iLoveNgocLan took care of the delivery. He sent 100 copies to Viet Cargo be to shipped to Vietnam. When he called Viet Cargo to confirm, they told him only 25 copies received. 75 copies were gone without any explanation. The next day, my partner called them again and they told him there was actually only 23 copies. By the time the CDs made their way to Vietnam, only 22 copies were delivered. That is the most irresponsible transaction I have ever seen.

When he told me about the incident. I looked up online and other people had similar experiences. These guys are thugs and thieves.

The collaboration between Miles Davis and Marcus Miller started with the controversial but remarkable Tutu. The album has that lazy-lightweight-80s-pop-fusion sound on the surface, but underneath Miles played dark, piercing, muted trumpet that made the heavy impact.

Their joint effort continued for the soundtrack of Siesta. Even though the orchestration is much less intricacy than what Gil Evans had arranged for Sketches of Spain, the album featured some mesmerizing Latin groove and fine duets between Mile’s trumpet and Miller’s bass clarinet.

Amandla marked the final collaboration between the two. Whereas Tutu laid down the foundation, Amandla took it further. The compositions were richer and Miles’s playing were fuller. He even blew without a muted device on “Mr. Pastorius.” It sounds such a damn pleasure to hear Miles played jazz again after all these years.

I love this piece: “Warren Buffett’s Best Kept Secret to Success: The Art of Reading, Remembering, and Retaining More Books.” It is reassuring to know that reading is still a great way to learn.

I learned a secret yesterday when I talked to my wife about the article and how I have become obsessed with books. She obviously already knew that. She told me that when her dad asked her why she wanted to married me even though I was totally useless when it came to fixing things around the house. Her response was that because I love reading and that later on when we have kids I could teach the kids to read. I asked her how did she know I loved to read and she replied, “Well, you spent most of your time at the bookstore when you weren’t working.” Came to think of it, the first time we met were at Barnes & Noble. So reading played a role in landed me a wonderful wife. How could I stop doing something with such a big benefit?

She also said that so far I haven’t done anything to help the kids to read. First of all, they’re two and five. Dao is a bright kid so I don’t think he would have a problem with reading. However, I don’t think reading could be forced. It has to come within yourself. I was not into reading when I was a kid. In fact, I hated it. My cousins kept telling me to read. One of them even signed me up for a local library card. I used to checked out book, read a few pages and fell asleep. Maybe my English was limited and I couldn’t understand the story.

In high school, one of my favorite classes was literature. I loved the teacher’s lecture, but I hated the reading. Fortunately I had a Vietnamese friend whose English was much better than me took the same class. Each night I would call her up so she could tell me what the book was about. I think the title of the book we had to read was The Red Badge of Courage. I am glad she was willing to do it and didn’t think I was being lazy.

When I was in college, I stopped buying books after my freshman year because I read none of it. I am still not sure how I graduated. My required courses such as religion, philosophy, English and biology ranged from grade B to C. Needless to see, my GPA wasn’t that good.

The love of reading came to me quite late. Blogging plays a part of it. I wanted to read books so I could write reviews. When I got into jazz, I read because I wanted to learn about the music and the players. My reading habit is determined by the things I was into at the time. For a period of time, all I read was books on Flash then on web design. When I was passionate about Miles Davis, I read every book I could get my hands on about him. Typography is both fascinating and challenging for me. There is so much to learn, but now I have read as much as I could and things have started to make sense.

One of the benefits of working at a University is the access to all the libraries in the area. I could get a loan from American or George Washington. I have picked up the habit of carrying a book with me whenever I go. If I have a spare moment like waiting for the kids to sleep in the car or waiting for a car service, I could pull out a book to read.

An ideal vacation for me would be to just relax and read. Because I have a lot of books that I want read and not much time, I try to read whenever I can. People probably think that I am just trying to look intelligent, but I am not. I just wanted to read. Because I want to learn something when I read, I hardly read fictional books. Not that I don’t get anything out of fictional books. I always enjoyed the writing style. I just want to read something that I could take away from it.

I have also been interested in the art of rereading. I return to Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style every now and then. I could learn something every time I read those books. I hope that my kids would be interested in reading as well. It’s probably better if they start young. I was too late into the game, but better late than never.

The last project for this year’s graduate seminar is designing a series of three posters. Purpose for the posters could be informative, educational, political, social or decorative. Posters needs to work together individually and as a group to make a graphical statement. Computer typesetting and images could be used, but the typographical focal point must be created by hand.

After giving the project some thoughts, I wanted to do something fun. I picked phrases that Dao and Dan had said in the past to use for the posters. The three I picked are quite hilarious.

“Daddy, dump fuck.”

While we were driving one day, Dan said to me real loud, “Daddy, dump fuck.” I was shocked so I asked him, “What did you just call me?” He replied, “Dump fuck” and pointed me to the dump truck. My execution was to take pictures of the dump truck toys and used Photoshop to place the toys together by hand to form the word “Fuck.”

“Daddy, I am allergic to your singing.”

We were driving home from daycare and I hit a pretty terrible falsetto just to tease him and he gave such an idiosyncratic respond: “Daddy, I am allergic to your singing.” My execute was to draw musical notes in Illustrator and place them together by hand to form the word “singing.”

“Daddy look, it’s my tadpole.”

I still can’t figure out where Dan got the association from. I was about to give him a bath. As I put the water in the bathtub and put him in, he said to me, “Daddy look, it’s my tadpole.” Then he grabbed his penis. I asked him again, “Your what?” He replied, “Tadpole.” I laughed my ass off in silent.

This seminar has been fun. Creating analog type was much more pleasure than I thought. Special thanks to my wife for assisting me on a few pieces. She’s much more craftier than I am and she is so good at mounting.

Mười năm về trước khi có tâm sự tôi thường viết lên đây. Vui, buồn hay giận tôi cũng có thể viết một cách tự do. Sau khi viết ra tôi cảm thấy nhẹ nhàng và thoải máy. Giờ đã khác. Tuy không ai cấm tôi nhưng tôi tự kiềm chế bản thân. Có lúc cũng viết nhưng rồi xóa đi.

Mấy tháng qua có một vài chuyện không vui nhưng không biết tâm sự cùng ai. Viết lên đây tôi cũng không muốn nên tôi đã tìm đến rượu và mượn rượu giải sầu. Tôi không phải là dân nghiện rượu. Tôi thích uống một vài ly cocktail nếu có đồ ăn ngon hay lâu lâu làm vài shots với anh em bạn bè.

Khi vui rượu cho tôi thêm một chúc lân lân như đang trên mây. Tôi rất thích cảm giác đó. Nhưng khi không được vui, rượu khiến tôi thêm sầu muộn, cộc cằn, cô độc và chán nản. Tôi nhận ra được đều đó và đang tìm cách giải quyết vấn đề riêng mà không cần nhờ đến rượu.

Có lẻ tôi nên chấp nhận số phận và không nên mộng ảo nữa. Nên thay đổi chính mình nếu đã hết đường lựa chọn. Tôi không muốn ảo giác của mình mà phải đánh mất hết tất cả. Tôi đã suy nghỉ rất kỹ và biết mình nên làm gì và không nên làm gì.