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My brief farewell post on Christopher Dang had found its way into people who were close to him or inspired by his works.
Thom Easix wrote to me on January 26, 2020:
Hi Donny,
We don’t know each other, but I just wanted to let you know that I read your blogpost about Chrisopher Dang and that I had the same experience as you. I also started designing in the early 2000’s when I was still a kid and I was really inspired by Halovision. I really looked up to him.
As time passed I also stopped following him, but once in a while I think back on that time. I always remember his art to still be really good.
So today I googled him again and yes, his old artworks still holds up. He had such a feel for typography, shapes and colors. I don’t know how to properly explain it in English, but he was really talented.
Today I also discovered he passed away and I found out through your blogpost.
I don’t know why I’m sending you this email, but I guess I want to thank you for your blog and it was nice to read that you also got inspired by him. It’s not something I can share with other people.
Have a good day,
Best,
Thom
I replied to Thom:
Dear Thom,
I am glad that you have shared your thoughts with me. When I found out that he passed away, I was shocked. I wrote that post wondering if other people had similar experience. You email is a proof. Chris was a talented artist and even his early works had left a deep impact in many of us who didn’t even know him.
Regards,
Donny Truong
Thom responded:
Hi Donny,
Thanks for your reply. I was really moved by it.
Because of your email I searched some more about him and I found out he was a very loved and good person. It kept me busy all day.
I hope he knew how many people he inspired and that his style is visible all over the world. I live in the Netherlands and I’m sure his work laid the foundation for what I like in graphic design.
For the future when I have a flashback to those early 2000’s, I will also remember your email and this story.
This is the beautiful side of the internet 🙂
I wish you all the best in your career and not to be too cheesy, but may his spirit live on in our work 🙂
Best,
Thom
I also shared with Thom an email from someone who was close to Chris. Alyssa Key wrote on December 19, 2020:
Hi Donny,
I found your site entry online when googling our beloved Tinypants. He died of natural causes, stemming from a trial pharmaceutical he was using from losing his vision. Ironic, isn’t it… halo vision. Anyways wanted to help answer that question for you. He was my partner, best friend, and soul mate for many years. Our lives went different paths a few years before his death and I never got a chance to remind him I loved him. We will all see him again soon though. Hope you’re well, sorry if this so random.
Warmest Regards,
Alyssa Key
I responded to Alyssa on December 19, 2020:
Dear Alyssa,
Thank you for writing. He was a gifted artist who reached so many people with his work. I didn’t know him personally, but I am sure he knew he still has a special place in your heart.
Thank you for answering my question. I hope you and your family are doing well and happy holidays.
Regards,
Donny Truong
Dr. Joy Garcia Tiên is my life-long mentor. I got to know Dr. Tiên through the Upward Bound program way back when I was in seventh or eighth grade. Upward Bound was the pre-college program that gave kids from low-income families an opportunity to pursue a higher education. By providing summer college courses, campus visitations, and job shadows with professionals in different fields, the Upward Bound program prepared children with limited access to educational resources a path to a better future. Through her kindness, compassion, and mentorship, Dr. Tiên had played an essential role in getting many of us, particularly Vietnamese-American children of immigrants, to where we are today.
Two weeks ago, I met up with Dr. Tiên for the first time in over twenty years. Even though we haven’t met face to face, Dr. Tiên has always been in contact to see how I was doing. She understood what it was like losing a mother and offered advice to help me pull through the darkest days of my life. When we were catching up about the good old time, in a windy evening at my mother’s resting place, Dr. Tiên mentioned that she is working on her own coaching and consulting endeavor called Educational Partnerships for Success. Helping kids to success has always been her passion for over 30 years; therefore, this project is near and dear to her heart. I offered to help with her website. Dr. Tiên only had two requirements: the ability to update the content herself and a blog component to share her writing. To meet her needs, WordPress is the obvious solution.
Since Dr. Tiên already purchased the domain name, we just needed to get the hosting through the same company. Domain.com’s hosting package offers SSL certificate and WordPress installation with a click of a button. I hope these features become standards for many hosting companies if they don’t have them already. Once WordPress was installed, I activated its Twenty Ninety theme. This theme offered a clean, simple design that would work well for Dr. Tiên’s website. To make it personal, I created a child theme to add the logo at the top, change the colors to match the branding, and reset the typography. For headings, I chose Fraunces, designed by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi, for its playfulness. For body text, I chose Rosario, designed by Héctor Gatti, for its academic friendliness. The two typefaces complement each other.
With the new Gutenberg editor inside WordPress, this theme gave me the flexibility to create different editorial elements through UI components as well as typographical hierarchies. It seemed to be the way to take advantage of WordPress’s Gutenberg. The days of creating a WordPress theme from scratch are long gone for me. I just needed to create the shell and rely on Gutenberg’s blocks to do the rest.
With the website up and running, I hope it will play a small role in getting Dr. Tiên started. She had already put together some wonderful STEM programs for the kids. I can’t wait to get my boys to enroll once the pandemic is under control. With her PhD in math, Dr. Tiên is also passionate about helping students who struggled with math to build more confidence in themselves.
I believe in Educational Partnerships for Success because Dr. Tiên had tutored, mentored, and guided me into the right direction. I am grateful for her support and her continuous work to help underserved kids, like myself and my friends were, to expand their potentials, reach their goals, and pursue their dreams.
I am proud to introduce the first redesign of this blog for 2021. The layout is still simple. The color is still red, but much more dominating. The focus is still on readability. The typeface is all new. In this redesign, I wanted to have just one typeface—one font file—to rule it all. From large display typography to bold headings to readable body copy to legible user interface to coding samples to small texts, Recursive, designed by Stephen Nixon, takes care of everything thanks to the flexibility of its variable font.
I had the opportunity to work with Stephen on adding Vietnamese diacritics to Recursive in September, 2019. Although I always had the typeface in mind, I didn’t know which project to use it with until Stephen sent me a copy of his book on Recursive in December of last year. The book is filled with typographic beauties and versatilities. It shows all the possibilities of using a variable font. The best part is where Stephen shared his original concept and the meticulous process. I was inspired.
With five different axes to play with, I had a lot of fun redesigning the site live in the browser. Wakamai Fondue was incredibly helpful in testing out different combinations as well as copying and pasting the CSS properties. Even though I don’t blog about coding much, I still love how the coding font matches up exactly with the text font.
I hope you enjoy the new design and thank you for reading.
Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first-ever youth poet laureate, on democracy and the orange monster:
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated
In this truth
in this faith we trust
Backward skating is hard. I haven’t spent too much time learning it—more like avoiding it. Yesterday I started my first ice skating lesson and this course is all about backward techniques so I better start practicing them. I could do backward swizzles on ice and that’s it. I am working on one-foot backward swizzles. I am also working backward on rollerblades. I really need to get backward skatings down; therefore; I will focus on these techniques in the next few weeks. That will be my goal.
Our Samsung dryer had been screeching for a long time and had not generating much heat. I told my wife to buy a new one, but she insisted on fixing it. She told me that a new dryer would cost from $600 to $1000. She watched this YouTube video showing how to replace the heating element and she bought all the parts.
The dryer was surprising easy to take apart. The machine was much simpler than what I had expected. With my wife’s instruction and help, we replaced the heating element, the belt, and the idler pulley. Unfortunately I broke the door switch when we put the parts together. The heating element generated hot air. The screeching noise is gone. The dryer works like new. I am glad that my wife wanted to fix it than to replace it.
Parts:
Total cost: $61
Two weeks ago I rediscovered The Matrix soundtrack and I have been re-listening to it at maximum volume in my minivan. The album brought back so many fond memories, particularly during the time I got sucked into Flash animation. I used to chop up those heavy metal, techno tracks into loops to accompany text effects and motion graphics, in which I spent countless hours of sleepless nights crafting in Flash. Although I had moved on from Flash over a decade ago, I always felt nostalgic about it. “Bonjour Vietnam” was created in Flash and it went viral all over the world, especially in the Vietnamese communities. Flash was officially dead on December 31, 2020. Listening to The Matrix, in which I had used every single track to create a piece of animation, was like mourning the death of an era in my design career. Rest in peace, Flash.
Tonight, after the challenging first day of ice skating class, I drove the kids home with The Matrix soundtrack playing in the background. My nine-year-old son asked me to dial the volume way up as Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Prime Audio Soup” was playing. For about six minutes driving home, the pounding bass, hard-hitting drums, and electronic sound effects made me feel upbeat, but it was the chanting, “set me free,” which repeated over and over again, that transcended me. Tomorrow we will be free. Free from all the craziness that had turned our lives upside down in the past four years. It started out as a joke, but it had quickly consumed our lives every single second. I kept asking myself how we could buy into all of this nonsense and stupidity. Somehow the more absurd it became, it found its way into people’s heads. It destroyed relationships, friendships, communities, and moralities. It damn-near killed our democracy. It mindfucked half of the country. It turned half of my own Vietnamese-American community into sad, embarrassed, disillusioned souls. Though I am not sure which half because I had been called the delusional one.
Although I had checked myself out, unplugged from its universe, and set my mind free, I sincerely hope that its effects will fade into darkness. Like Flash, it will be officially gone tomorrow and an end to an American tragic. Let’s break out some champagne and celebrate because America had won the battle for the soul. Long live democracy.
On December 9, I completed the Adult-2 level for ice skating lesson at the Medstar Capitals Complex in Arlington, which is closer to my workplace. I had a wonderful experience. Alissa Strawcutter was a great instructor.
The day before, I started my new lesson at the Fairfax Ice Arena. I managed to recruit Đạo as well. I signed us up for the Alpha level, which included forward stroking, forward crossovers, and snowplow stop. Đạo’s first class went well. The skills were just right for him. As for my adult class, most of the students just started out. My new coach recognized that; therefore, she asked her assistant to work one on one with me. Since I could do forward stroking and snowplow stop, she worked with me on crossovers. It was like having a private lesson. I liked that.
On Thursday, I had to leave town to be with my mother. I knew it would be a while before I could return. I asked Đán to take over my lessons and he agreed. Since Đán is better than me, I requested to place him in Beta, which included backward stroking, backward crossovers, and T-stops. Although the class was already halfway through, he picked up with no problem.
While staying at my sister’s house, I went to the Lancaster Ice Rink whenever I could. The whole time I focused on getting down my crossovers. It took me three public sessions (about three hours) to get my forward crossovers down. It was hard to keep my balance, especially when I cross my left foot over my right foot.
Đán finished his Beta class last week and he will be starting Beta/Gamma today. Đạo continues with his Alpha class. Since I got my crossovers, I signed up for the Beta level so all three of us could have our lessons at the same time. I am looking forward to it.
As for rollerblading, I found the beautiful Conestoga Greenway Trail nearby my sister’s house. When I stressed out about my mother’s condition and just wanted to scream, I went out rollerblading. The up and down hills gave me great workouts. I also went to the Lancaster County Skate Park, which is across the street from the trail, to work on going down the ramps.
I even returned to the Castle Roller Rink for the first time in twenty something years. It brought back so many fond memories. We were so young and full of life. My buddy Luân was the star among us. I could barely skate, but I had so much fun. The music was always pumping. They played hip-hop and r&b hits the whole time. Inviting a girl out to the floor on a slow jam was always something us fellows always looked forward to. Holding her hand with your sweating palm and hoping the slow jam never ended. When I came back the vibe was still the same, I was just much older. I don’t recall they allowed rollerblades back then (only rollerskates), but they do now. Although I can skate much better than I did back then, I was the only one with guards and a helmet on. I am fine with that.
For years, I knew I needed to do some form of exercise to keep myself healthy, but I could not stick to anything until I got into ice skating and rollerblading. By getting myself into these sports, I hope that my kids will pick up as well—something for them to do besides playing on their iPads. It looks like we’re not going skiing this year, which I really missed. I am hopeful that we can do so next year. I wanted to try out snowboarding.
The first season of History of Swear Words is enlightening as fuck. Shit, I love to use profanity, but I stayed away from that word bitch. I just don’t want to be a dick. Pussy is another word that I’ll be damned to use. I can’t wait to learn more in the next season.