After many months of itching for a new design, I spent the last four sleepless nights realigning instead of redesigning my personal site. My original intention was to revamp both the design and the codes, but I simply can’t escape the white background. Although the layout isn’t drastically different, I incorporated many new things I have learned in the past few months. So let’s walk through some highlights.

The navigation is completely reworked. As you might have already noticed, the inspiration comes straight from Apple.com. What can I say? I am a fan of Apple’s design. I can’t be a sleek as Apple so I settled for more colorful.

The layout is now much wider (940px). The design is based on a grid that inspired by Khoi Vinh’s Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design. Until I read his book, most of my previous designs based on improvised grid. Although the previous design worked out well with 800px, it’s time to move on toward larger screen; however, the new layout is also responsive and fits nicely with mobile devices. Big up to Ethan Marcotte for the invaluable tutorial on fluid layout from Dan Cederholm’s Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design.

HTML had been rewritten after many rereads of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. This site also uses some features from the rock-solid HTML5 Boilerplate. Paul Irish rocks!.

A big part of this redesign was for me to go through WordPress 3.0 and create a framework just in case my feature clients would like to use WordPress as a CMS. I wanted Visualgui to be a parent theme and than later on I can just build a child theme to meet whatever design the clients request. That way, I’ll have a based template to start off with. Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful is a great resource. I went through WordPress’s default theme Twenty Ten line by line and tried to convert it into HTML5 markups. I was half way through before I discovered ToolBox. That was exactly what I needed. So I went back to use Toolbox as a reference to build out a framework. For the purpose of this site however, I only use some basic functions.

As for typography, I am finally moving away from Helvetica, a font that works so well in term of clarity and supporting Vietnamese characters. The latter has been the reason I have been holding on to Helvetica for so long even my printed material was set in Helvetica. I am now switching to Cabin for the branding and headlines. I guess it’s time to print some new business cards to be consistent. For body text, I went for Goudy Bookletter 1911, my favorite classic typeface.

For CSS, I am playing with multi-column, which splits my blog posts into two columns. The new element doesn’t work on all browsers, but it doesn’t hurt. So yeah, that’s it for now. I am sure there are still tons of touchups need to be done. The screenshots on the sites and motion section need to be be resize. I’ll do that later. It’s time to catch some sleep. Work starts in a couple of hours.

Instead of following the Grammy, we watched For Colored Girls, a film that drags the colored boys to the mud. After the depressing ending, we tuned into the Grammy for a bit and caught Esperanza Spalding beat both Justin Bieber and Drake for Best New Artist. I was shocked that the Grammy was actually getting it right. The award went to real talent instead of commercial success.

I was glad that she won, but I was also speculating that the Bieber’s fans would be quite upset. I headed over Twitter and I could see all the hate tweets flooded. The little Beliebers attack, threaten Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding.

Up until this past Sunday, Ms. Spalding was probably only known to jazz fans. I listened to her 2008’s self-titled Esperanza two years ago. Her singing did not impressed me much, but her bass plucking was as strong as any big man. Her recent work with Joe Lovano on Bird Songs was hypnotizing. Esperanza Spalding is indeed a bass beauty.

From softwares, scripting languages to CMS’s, every web designer has his own set of tools. With so many choices out there, I find that focusing on a certain skill set is more valuable than trying to learn everything. With that said, I would like to share some of my preferred tools in designing and developing web sites.

Graphic software: Photoshop is still my choice even though I am still not sure how much I know about the software. All I know is that Photoshop helps me accomplish the tasks I want to do when creating photos for the web or making mock-ups. Even when I have the opportunity to create print materials such as business cards, flyers and book covers, I never even bothered to use InDesign. I just ask the print designers for the specs and I do everything in Photoshop. Firework is probably a better choice for making web graphics, but I never spend enough time to get to know the software.

Web editor: Yes, I am still using Dreamweaver and I am not ashamed to admit it. Many hardcore programmers seem to look down on Dreamweaver, but I find it to be quick and easy to use, especially when I have to maintain many pages. The copy-and-paste into the design view has improved tremendously in CS5. Dreamweaver no longer pulls in crazy codes from Words like it used to. Before CS5, I had to use an HTML cleaner my friend and former colleague had made to strip out tags and replaces quotes with unicode characters. It’s a great tool and I still use it from time to time.

Web technologies: I used to be a Flash fanatic, but I moved away from it and concentrated on HTML and CSS. I am glad I did. Flash is still a fantastic tool and I am still using it to create simple motion graphic projects, but I cringe whenever I come across a full Flash web site.

Scripting languages: I am not a hardcore programmer and PHP doesn’t seem so daunting to me. I can write simple codes and modify existing scripts to get what I need. Whatever I need to accomplish something using PHP chances are I can find something similar out there.

CMS: WordPress is the system I am most comfortable with. In addition, its flexibility and ease of use, specially the admin interface, are perfect for running small web sites. I experimented with Drupal in the past, but didn’t get into it far enough to see how easy I could create a theme. I will revisit version 7 in the near future, but for now, WordPress could handle most of the things I would like to do.

Valentine’s Day is coming and if you’re still looking for the gift that speaks from the heart, take a quick glance at Simplexpression. We offer two-day shipping so you still have a bit of time left. We also would like to thank our loyal customers for making the latest purchases. To show our appreciation, we will send along something special from us and we hope you will enjoy it.

Unlike his previous Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, which was all over the place, Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful focuses mainly on theme development.

To help readers understand how theming works, Hedengren deconstructs WordPress’s default Twenty Ten. He then explains the concept of child theme and how quickly one can build his own based on a parent theme or a framework. The selling point of this book is obviously how to build one’s own theme and Hedengren has done a great job of walking readers through three different sites: semi-static (for small, corporation site), media (for portfolio site) and magazine. He also covers briefly on BuddyPress, a plugin that adds social-networking features to WordPress-powered site.

Because of its flexibility and easy-to-use admin interface, WordPress is a perfect tool for clients who would like to update contents themselves. Smashing WordPress Themes is an excellent guide for web designers who would like to build sites using WordPress as a content management system.

Mood: happy, chatty, playful
Enjoyed: story time, outside/gym

Notes and Reminders: “Lots of words, sentences, great coordination kicking and spinning balls.”

Glad to see you’re enjoying your time while away from us. Ms. Ester gave you great complement. She told us that whenever she takes you guys outside, you say car, truck, snow, ice and so on. You know all the name of your classmates as well as the names from another class. She also said that you gave everyone a hug.

This morning, I took you to the new car. You didn’t see the old car so you said “mat xe cu” (old car is lost). This evening, I took you out of the car to go into the house and you said “too lanh (cold).” You have already speaking Vietlish?

In addition to my main responsibility, which is maintaining GWSB web sites, I actively update the GWSB homepage with new banners and videos. Keeping the homepage fresh with new contents make my job more engaging. I also work closely with the associate director of media relations to make the GWSB News, which powered by the rock-solid WordPress system, updated constantly.

One of my contributions to the GWSB News is posting videos. Whenever I get video from the Dean or faculty, I edit the clips using QuickTime Pro and post them on YouTube. One of my favorite projects right now is filming and editing the clips for the Student Voices. The Flip is the perfect tool for this project because of its ease of use. The FlipShare, its organizing, editing and publishing software, is so straightforward and intuitive. Within half an hour, I can make a 3-minute decent clip.

I just received a bunch of clips from the students using the Flip and I am very exciting to edit them to be used on the GWSB News. Since I am not doing anything fancy, the Flip allows me to cut to the point of the video.

Dana’s brother gave me Roger Kamien’s Music: An Appreciation. I find the first part of the book to be valuable in helping readers understand the fundamental elements of music such as pitch, dynamics, tone color, rhythm, melody and harmony.

My co-worker gave me The Penguin Guide to Jazz by Richard Cook and Brain Morton. The book is about 1600 page; therefore, I won’t read it from cover to over but keep it for reference on jazz albums.

The GW Hatchet reports:

The University is scrapping its current website management system – part of a $1 million website revamp started nearly two years ago – claiming it no longer suits GW’s online needs.

As a web developer for The School of Business who had been involved with the project, I applaud the University for making the change. Although Vignette is a very powerful system and I am getting a handle of its complexity from a user perspective, it is not the right CMS for GW. The University is in the process of selecting a replacement. The choices look promising.

Simplexpression opens its door on Etsy. Come and check us out. We will add more items as time permits.