In his presentation titled, “The UX Army of One: How to Get More Done with Less,” Jonathan Rubin, program manager for the DigitalGov User Experience Program at the U.S. General Services Administration, explained five simple steps to get usability and user experience rolling in your organization.

The first step is to take advantage of cheap, effective resources such as templates (scripts, personas and Heuristic evaluations), free tool trials (for prototyping includes Axure, Balsamiq and POP) and books (Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug).

The second step is to make quick wins. He suggests making small tweaks along the way rather than making big design changes. For usability, he advised using three testers and to focus on three top usability issues.

The third step is to sell your concept by presenting both good and bad UX stories and showing before and after screenshots of your design. Jon also recommends applying Jakob’s “Corporate Usability Maturity.”

The fourth step is to share results quickly (the day of the testing if possible). When sharing the results, don’t just email them. Present the results instead. Making quick reaction videos are highly recommended if you have the resources.

The final step is to build a team. Find other people who do user experience both inside and outside of your organization. Give yourself a cool title like user experience evangelist or UX team lead. Hands-on training is also a great way to build a partnership.

While the presentation was informative, it focused more on usability than UX aspect. Jon spoke more from a theory than design perspective. Still, I am glad to see some UX activities in the NoVA community. I am definitely keeping an eye on the NoVA UX Meetup in the future.

Like many self-taught web designers, I questioned the value of academia. Before enrolled into the master program in graphic design at the George Mason University School of Art, I wondered if the investment worthwhile. Would I get anything out of school or would I just waste my time? As I listened to a few web design podcasts that covered the same topic, I had more doubts. Many web designers left school because they found the programs weren’t up to speed with the industry. They weren’t taught responsive web design or the latest technologies.

Even though I was unsure about going back to school, I applied for an MA program away because the degree would allow me to teach and share my passion for web design. In spring of 2012, I was accepted into the program and decided to give it a try. After more than ten years, I was excited to be back to the classroom environment. For my first semester, I took a four-credit course on advanced typography and one-credit course on graduate design seminar.

As much as I love type, I struggled in advanced typography. I could hardly keep up with the professor’s expectation. Each class I had to bring in 20 to 30 pieces of work for critique. As a result, I just had to churn out work, but had no time to refine any of it. I made it through the class, but it was stressful. I didn’t learn much because the course felt like an acrobatic exercise than creative thinking. Once again, I wondered if the efforts and the investments worth it. I thought of dropping out, but decided to give it one more shot.

In the spring of 2013, I took a four-credit advanced web design and a one-credit seminar. I had been doing web design for the past ten years and my technological skills were fairly up to date; therefore, the web design course should be a piece of cake. I was wrong. I struggled even more. While the professor wanted me to do sketches on papers and mockups in Photoshop, I wanted to jump straight into the browser. Our approaches were totally different. Since I was the one being graded on, I needed to follow the professor’s approach.

While I was having a hard time with my advanced web design class, I had fun in the seminar class. For the entire semester the class focused on building a board game. I created a jazz trivia game. What I enjoyed so much about the class was that I was working something that interested me. Rather than just getting the assignment done, I put the effort into the work. At the same time, I got to know a classmate that changed my perspective on schooling. Even though the seminar was just a one-credit, he put 200% into his projects. He went the extra miles on everything he did and that inspired me.

In the fall of 2013, I took a four-credit course on brand identity design and a one-credit seminar. I did well on both because I turned the assignments into opportunities. Rather than just trying to fulfill the requirements, I selected the subjects that I was passionate about and that made the whole different. I put more thoughts into the contents and the design process.

It took me three semesters to realize that you get out of graduate school what you put in. The courses won’t prepare you for the newest trend in the industry, but they prepare you for critical thinking and problem solving. As a result, I learned to select classes that would broaden my horizon rather than classes that teach technical skills. Instead of choosing classes that I know I could breeze through, I would choose classes that would challenge me. In that regard, graduate school is worthwhile.

Since the focus of this seminar is on analog typography, I would like to present one of my favorite type designers whose work involved mostly with hand lettering. Her name is Jessica Hische. Here’s a short bio of Jessica from The Great Discontent:

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, and self-described “avid internetter”. After graduating with a degree in Graphic and Interactive Design from Tyler School of Art, she worked for Headcase Design in Philadelphia and was Senior Designer at Louise Fili Ltd. After two and a half years, she left to further her freelance career and has also become well known for her side projects including Daily Drop Cap and the micro-sites, Mom This is How Twitter Works, Should I Work for Free?, and Don’t Fear the Internet, a collaborative project with [her husband] Russ.

Jessica’s clients include Wes Anderson, Tiffany & Co., the New York Times, Penguin Books, Target, Leo Burnett, and Wired Magazine. She’s been named a Print Magazine New Visual Artist (20 under 30), one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Design, and an ADC Young Gun. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club Board of Directors.

Let’s take a look at some of her featured projects.

Jess & Rush Keepsake

This is a printed book based on their online wedding invitation, which is a crazy parallax web site.

Mail Chimp logo revision

I love the details that went into the revision to make the letters more legible at small sizes.

CAA Friday Night Party

Here’s an elegant invitation based on theme of The Great Gatsby.

Minot Font

A display typeface to use used for special occasions such as wedding invites and baby announcements (minot means “child” in French).

Penguin Drop Caps

A series of twenty-six collectible hardcover editions of fine works of literature. Each cover featured a letter illustrated by Jessica.

Moonrise Kingdom

Jessica worked directly with director Wes Anderson on his recent film titled Moonrise Kingdom. Initially she was hired to create 20 credits in the beginning of the movie and a typeface to be used for the end credits. She ended up creating two fonts—a display and a text weight of the same typeface. “Working with Wes was an absolute dream” she said, “I was amazed and impressed at just how involved he is with every aspect of his films.”

Side projects

Aside from client work, Jessica creates side projects to exercise her creativities.

Thousand Under 90

Go ahead and give yourself an award.

Don’t fear of the Internet

A series of video that teaches HTML and CSS to none-web designers.

Quotes & Accents

A brief, useful guide of how to create smart quotes and dashes.

The Daily Drop Cap

A little side project that made a big impact on her career. She illustrated a letter a day and posted them online. The site received more than 100,000 visitors per month.

About Her Site

Her visual design skill alone is incredible and yet what I admired about Jessica is that she also teaches herself coding to build her own web site. In addition to learning HTML and CSS, she also learned CMS. With her recent redesign, she moved off WordPress and rebuilt her site with Kirby, which is a static file generator. I read about Kirby from following her work and played it with a bit. I am using it on a small client project and quite impressed with its lightweight, flexibility and security.

A few years ago, I went to an interview for a web design position at a government agency. I passed the first interview and was asked to come back to present my work to the director. Once I arrived, the secretary already set up a PC laptop for me to demonstrate my portfolio.

As the director booted up the laptop, he couldn’t find Chrome or Firefox. IE 8 was the only browser available. He said, “Well, this is actually a test to see if your sites work on older browsers.” I said with confidence, “Of course, they would.” Even though I was already using new HTML5 elements at the time, I made sure my site worked on IE 6 as much as it could. I couldn’t have imagined how I would gone through the interview with broken web pages.

With the web, you never know what situation you would run into. It probably doesn’t matter if you’re not intended to work for government or university. Still, if you can support older browser, you should. Progressive enhancement is still very important as proved here.

Even though I signed up for Pinterest ages ago, I only get around to use it today. I needed to collect jazz typographic posters and album covers for a class project and Pinterest seems like a good tool. While at it, I uploaded screenshots of Visualgui.com past designs. I also moved Vassar homepage banners and Vassar homepage redesign screenshots over there as well. If you want to connect, hit me up.

I am working on a due-over project for my class on professional design practices. After showing my portfolio, my professor suggested that I rework Sketches of Miles. I was not thrilled about the idea at first, but now I am loving it. I am not just redoing it, but make an extension of it. I’ll share the project once I am done, but working on it gives me the reason to re-listen to Miles. I also reread Greg Tate’s essays on electric Miles. That man is simply a brilliant critic. I am rereading Richard Cook’s It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record. I am also intending to reread a few books on Miles when I get a chance. What can I say? I am officially a Miles freak who can’t get enough of Miles’ Voodoo.

Reading this book (as recommended from my professor in a course on professional design practices) depresses me. According to the pricing in this handbook, I need to triple my rate for my web design and development services. I do recognize that my rate is a bit cheaper than the industry standard. I take on freelance projects for the passion of web design more than to make money. As a result, I never make it on my own as a freelance designer. Have this book on hand if you want to make a living as a freelancer.

Here are a few recent podcasts I added to my iPhone:

Let’s Make Mistakes

I love the chemistry between Mike Monteiro’s dry humor and Jessie Char’s whimsical charm. I do hope they talk about design more. I completely agree with Mike on The New York Times’s snow effect. The article was stunning, but I never get to read it.

Typetalk

This is a fairly new podcast on web typography. Dennis Gaebel and Zachary Kain still need some time to polish their chops, but the content is promising.

Real Time with Bill Maher

I am a long fan of Bill Maher, but I don’t have HBO; therefore, the podcast is a great alternative.

Song Travels with Michael Fienstein

I only caught a few episodes of this podcast and planning to go back to the archive for some artists I recognize. Unfortunately, the podcast only contains 15 minutes. Each episode is an hour long on NPR web site.

I work at the George Mason University School of Law as a web services developer. I am responsible for everything that has to do with the web from visual design to front-end development to Linux administration. I also do freelance web design, but schoolwork has kept me too busy. I have tons of projects in my portfolio, but for the sake of time, I’ll focus on some of the works I have done in classes.

Vietjazz

For my graduate course on Brand Identity Design, I created my dream record company called Vietjazz. The goal was to produce and promote Vietnamese music with jazz flavor. An example would be to take a melodic Vietnamese ballad as a basic structure and improvise on it using jazz arrangement. The target audience is for Vietnamese listeners like myself who also love jazz.

We spent a significant amount of time on working and revising the logo. I came up with more than a hundred designs and ended up with this. The logo consists of eight vertical bars. The slight tilting and offsetting of each bar conveys dynamics. All the bars are in blue expect for the green accent on the letter “j” to signify syncopation. The logo is set in one of my favorite typefaces: Univers by Adrian Frutiger.

After the logo, we developed stationery, which included business card, letterhead and envelope. Then we get to choose three applications. I picked the vinyl cover, a mobile app and a web site.

The final assignment was my favorite project. We had to come up with the brand guide. While all of my classmates chose to do a book format, I chose to do it as a web site. My reason was that a web site is always available. In addition, if the big boss wants to make some changes to the brand, you don’t have to reprint the guide. You can download all of the brand assets right away. I also love all the details that go into the guide.

I learn a great deal in that class and Jake is the man. If you haven’t taken his class, I highly recommend it.

Color Blindness

For my previous seminar with Shanshan, we focused on storytelling. For the first project, the assignment was to use data to tell a story. I did a poster on color blindness. Accessibility is one of the things that I care deeply about web design. I want to make sure that web sites are accessible to everyone. Whether you have visual impairment or color blindness, you should be able to access the web and that’s the beauty of the web.

Somewhere in America

“Somewhere In America” was a fun project. The assignment was to tell a story based on literary piece. I picked Jay Z’s “Somewhere In America” because on the outer layer it’s a pop record, but Jay Z packed so much references underneath the lyrics. For example, the line about “Somewhere in America, Miley Cyrus is still twerkin’” has a racism reference in it. Hip-hop is inseparable because kids are living in it without knowing it.

Unitea

Unitea is a fictitious tea company I developed for the final project. The goal was to build a brand with a unique story. The concept behind Unitea is the playoff on the word “unity.” When we gather around drinking tea, we unite. Tea brings people together. To build a unique story for Unitea, I developed a campaign web site to inform our customers the five core principles we valued: clarity, connectivity, community, charity and creativity. I called them “The Five C’s of Unitea.”

This is a required reading for my graduate course on professional design practices. Shaughnessy has great advices on making a living as a designer ranging from finding a job, running a studio, seeking new work to talking to clients. For example, here’s his rule when meeting clients:

I never talk about myself until they ask me to. Instead, I let them talk, I ask them questions about their business, and I allow them to have a center stage. Then, a little bit of magic occurs; they (usually) turn to me and say—OK, tell me about you.

His advice on interview is worth-noting too:

It is only by meeting people in both environments that we gain sufficient insight to allow us to decide which is best for us. In fact, here’s another little nostrum to add to the list that we’re accumulating: there’s no such thing as a bad interview. Even bad ones are good; I learned a lot about design and life from being interviewed by people.

I wrote a post on “The Art of Interview” two years ago; therefore, I concur with Shaughnessy that you can learn a great deal from being interviewed.

I recommend How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul to new designers, especially recent graduates, even though I find the book a bit dull. For one, I am no longer new to the game and I have heard of every tips in the book. For two, the book is set in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk, which makes the reading experience incredibly bland, and the changes in layout interrupt the flow.