Added two movie posters I created for my Advanced Typography class. The assignment was to choose a horror or comedy film, design for one genre and then flip it for the opposite genre. Since this is a typography class, I can only use 10% illustration and 90% typography. I ended up redesigning Donnie Darko, which I started out with the horror version and then flipped it for comedy. Though the process was a pain, I like the way they turned out. Now I have to frame the print versions on mounting boards, something I had never done before.

Paul Krugman:

Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.

In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.

These past few weeks had been crazy. I am back to 3-5 hours of sleep. The kids were sick over the weekend and throwing up all over the house. Dao got Croup and Dan got a little cold. My graduate classes are exhausting. My days had been going to work, going to class, eating dinner, putting the kids to sleep, doing homework until 1 or 2 in the morning. I feel bad that Dana had to look after both kids while I attended classes and had to do most of the work around the house while I spent time on the computer all the time.

I talked to my mom yesterday and I apologized that I haven’t called much or visited much on weekends because of my workload. Her first respond was “If you can’t handle school just quit. You have two kids and a full time job. Besides, what is that degree going to benefit your career? You’ll still do the same thing you do now.” I was like, “Thanks for the encouragement, mom.”

Workers at Sensata, which owned by Bain Capital, are fighting to save their jobs from being shipped to China by the end of this year. Romney who has a major investment in the company is the workers’ only last hope. I would love to be wrong, but it’s not going to happen. Romney simply doesn’t give a damn about these people. So there goes Romney’s job creation… in China.

Amy Davison:

Somehow, asking whether our economy might ever have victims is itself an act of victimizing Mitt. Resentment based in a sense of under-appreciation can be unattractive.

If you’re having money problem I feel bad for you, son. Mitt got 99 problems but a poor ain’t one.

Romney told millionaires:

[T]here are 47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… These are people who pay no income tax… [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

My wife asked me earlier today, “Why would Romney run for President? He’s all set for life.” My answer was that because he wants to protect his wealth as well as the wealthy’s wealth. His talk above proved my point.

In the Advanced Typography class tonight, we presented a bunched of existing restaurant menus for a redesign project. One of the menus I selected was from Hủ Tiếu Mì Lacay Chợ Lớn. The professor looked at the menu and said “Lacay Cho Lồn.” Me and another Vietnamese girl laughed our ass off. The professor looked at me and said, “What did I say?” I told him, “You don’t want to know.” But he insisted so I told him, “You said, ‘give me pussy.'” The entire class laughed. He asked me to say the proper name as well as the one he pronounced. He couldn’t believe just a slight change of sound could change the entire meaning.

It’s my pleasure to present the new redesign of Poplar Springs, a family-owned restaurant, spa and hotel nestled in northern Virginia’s wine country. Working on the project over the last six months had been challenging but also rewarding.

When I first met the owner and chef Howard Foer and his team, I knew immediately they would need a content strategist. Mary Dempsey, a fantastic writer and journalist who I had the pleasure to work with at The George Washington University School of Business, came to mind. We brought her on board and she did an outstanding job of getting the contents from the client and writing them in a short, concise approach. Our collaboration worked out so well that I would love to bring her on for future projects.

With the content out of my way, I was able to focus on the design and development part of the site. My first task was to redesign the logo. The previous logo was slapped together using Edwardian Script. The logo looked outdated and not legible. With the new design, I kept the poplar leaf and used clean, thin Futura for a modern look and feel. With the new brand, I created a simple layout to show off the beautiful property, the mouth-watering dishes and the relaxing activities in the countryside.

The front-end design was built using HTML5 and CSS3 with a responsive layout. The most impressive part of the site is using MODx Revolution as a content management system. Before selecting a CMS for the site, I faced with two choices: WordPress and MODX. Poplar Springs is not a complex site; therefore, both platform could do the job well. WordPress could have been an easier choice for me, but I determined to use the project to learn MODX. Nothing beats learning by actually doing it. It was quite an incredible journey. Even though I ran into the wall in a few stages, I have learned so much about MODX. After this project, MODX will be my choice of CMS moving forward. With just a bit of knowledge, I could build the entire site with the exact codes I marked up. Nothing makes a designer happier than viewing the source code to see the exact output he had intended. Try that with Drupal.

I am extremely satisfied with the outcome of the site. Thanks to Howard and his team for putting their trust in me and thanks to Mary for a fruitful teamwork.

My next project fo the Advanced Typography class is to redesign a menu for an existing restaurant. The catch is that the restaurant has to be small, inexpensive “mom and pop” joint with a simple, poorly designed menu. I knew exactly where I could find the materials.

Today I head to Eden for lunch with a few restaurants in mind. My first stop was Thanh Truc’s. This is a small shop with a very selected menu: bun bo hue and com tam. I explained to the owner the purpose of borrowing the menu. If his menu is selected for a redesign, I would give it to him for free once the project is completed. He can use it if he wants to. If not it doesn’t cost him a penny. His menu is simple a laminated piece of paper; therefore, it’s a perfect candidate.

Then I went over to Thanh Van. They only serve vegan food so I thought I could play with the green concept. Unfortunately the owner didn’t want to let me borrow his menu. Pho Xe Lua should be fun to play around with the train concept as well, but the owner didn’t let me use it either. So I went to Hai Ky Mi Gia. I was pretty sure that she would have no problem with it since I dine there quite frequent. To my surprise, she refused and just wouldn’t give me a reason. They must have thought that I try to steal their ideas to open my own restaurant or something. If I were to head to Viet Bistro, I am sure Antonio would let me use his, but his menu looks very nice already. It looks to me like he’s only one who take great pride in his menu.

I used the same approach to American’s “mom and pop” places and all of them were glad to provide me their menus. They even told me that they would love to see the new design if their menu was selected.

More and more dictionary users prefer online over print for speed and convenience. Accessing an online dictionary by typing in a word is much faster than thumbing through the pages in the print edition. While the smallest unit of a print dictionary might be 1,000 pages due to its unisequential design, the smallest unit of an online dictionary depends on the hardware resource (the bigger the space the more information is stored) due to its multisequential design.

Because of its linear, unisequential design, print dictionary is standardized based on alphabetical order. To look up a word, the users need to flip to the first letter of the word and then go to the next letter until they find the word they are searching for. Because of its non-linear, multisequential design, online dictionary is standardized based on word input. In her book, Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray argues:

Programmable bits can imitate legacy media and present unisequential documents and film clips, but they are particularly well suited to more complex multisequential objects that can be assembled and navigated in more than one order. Computational structures allow us to describe entities as variables that can have different values at different times, and to make conditional statements that have more than one possible outcome (Page 53).

In print, to know what items are available users simply have to look them up and make sure that they didn’t miss or misspell the word. In online, the application would tell the users if the items are available. It would also make suggestions if the users misspelled the word. The suggestion alone (something like, “Did you mean…”) saves the users time and confusion.

How items are chosen for inclusion depend on their usage. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary:

To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it’s used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.

In term of reliable information, users should use resources they trust. For example, if they trust the Merriam-Webster dictionary, they should use the same source for both online and print. In term of availability, the print edition is much more reliable. The online version relies on the connection to the Internet and the usage of the server. Users may experience slowness and unreliability if the connection is weak, the server is flushed with traffic or the application is not optimized for performance.

In print, updates only get pushed once in a few years. Cost for printing is the reason. Furthermore, making corrections are even slower in print. For online, updates are simply a click of a button. The online dictionary could be updated any time and the users would get the immediate change, which is a huge advantage of online over print dictionary.

As someone who works and spends most of the time on the web, I choose to use digital over traditional dictionary. I prefer the speed and the multisequential objects of the digital media. At times I just type in the word that I am not sure of to get suggestions to the right word. And because the thesaurus is a tab away, I could get to the synonyms and the antonyms with one click rather than putting down the paper dictionary and picking up the paper thesaurus. In the past year or so, however, I don’t use the online edition as much as I used to because all of the dictionary sites are filled with ads. Dictionary.com, in particular, sometimes makes me click on the ad first before I could access the search box.

According to Murray, “The biggest different between the computer and earlier media of representation is its procedural property, its ability to represent and execute conditional behaviors.” As I have mentioned above, the online dictionary uses procedural medium to response to its users. The online dictionary would present the definition if it recognizes the word or make a suggestion to the word the users might be looking for. As for the use of the participatory medium, the online dictionary allows users to interact with the information such as clicking on the link to read more definition or click on the tab to read its synonyms and antonyms. In term of spatial affordances, the use of visual cue of the audio icon is highly effective. The audio pronunciation is extremely useful for words that are hard to say as well as for foreigners, like myself, whose English is a second language. This use of spatial affordance can’t be accomplished through the print dictionary.

(Second essay for Graduate Design Seminar)