Visualgui.com

The School of Business’s faculty directory has been redesigned and brought back in house.

The one-page highlighting GWSB’s faculties who are mentioned in the media has been reworked. This is the kind of clean-up work I do while waiting for the contents for my main project.

This week, I have been working like a buffalo on the rice field with the speed of a horse on the racetrack to redesign the GWSB News and as the same time to kick out the new issue on top of another site’s priority. The newsletter comes out every other week and I am responsible for putting it up, so if I keep on patching the old design with the 1990s’ codes, eventually they will come back and bite me in the ass; therefore, I went ahead and revamped everything from the ground up. The new design is much cleaner and easier to maintain. Now I can sleep.

Oh yeah, there’s a quick blurb about me in the archive.

While riding the bus to work yesterday, the idea struck. As soon as I arrived into my office, shot an email over to Ao Trang requesting for the photos from the 2008 calendar. Like always, the PR guy was very fast in responding to me (Thanks, you guys rock). The music has been on the back of my mind for quite a while now. I was just waiting for the right images. Without further to say, here is Tinh Hoai Huong.

The fresh new site for the Office for Fellowships and Preprofessioanl Advising kicks off my first design for 2008, but also marks my last work for Vassar. I hope there will be room for freelance project in the future.

A new theme for iLoveNgocLan.com to celebrate Ngoc Lan’s birthday. She would be 51 today.

The new design for Vassar College Department of Music has rolled out earlier than intended schedule due to the first live webcast of Vassar College Choir on Friday. In addition to designing the look and feel, I had a chance to work on a real project with Cascade Server (Vassar’s newly implemented CMS). My colleague Megg Brown has been a tremendous help with the CMS as well as in making the site possible to go live.

The feedbacks regarding to Vassar’s new design have been positive. This week we’re showing off the gorgeous Chapel. I loved the shot when I was comping up the design and knew it will make it to the layout.

Individuality is part of Vassar’s identity. We pride ourselves in being unique; therefore, our public face (the homepage) displayed its distinctiveness almost every day. (You can still browse through the collection of banners I have created since my first day at Vassar in the department of graphics). Even though we still love our previous approach, and I will miss designing those banners, we need to step up our game. The challenge is how to top ourselves by moving forward and still keep what we love.

With that kind of challenge, it takes a dedicated team to tackle. Through thorough research (which includes looking at hundreds of colleges’ homepage), careful evaluation, and endless discussion, we came up with a solid design that would give us flexibilities and still be able to remain unique. In other words, we based our design around a central location, which housed easy-to-access information. As long as we keep the essential element in the same position, the sky is the limit.

As part of the team, my main responsibility is designing the layout, and one of the things that still strike me the most about Vassar is the beautiful campus from outside landscapes to inside architectures. Instead of just showing small, quick-to-load photo, I want to make it big and part of the design. On the new site, I used a detailed shot of the Students’ Building to give a vibe of the place where students gathered for lectures, parties, or just to chill out. But using a beauty shot is just one approach. A wide range of styles will be revealed as we move into this new direction.

So what has been changed? We don’t get to design banners on a daily basis anymore, but we get to focus more on the entire web page. So without further delay, allow me to introduce to you our new homepage, and you could read the official statement about our new design. We also revamped the secondary pages for a crisp, clean and simple look and feel. My kudos goes out to the web team. It was an amazing experience working with a group of talented individuals who had brought their expertise to the table. You guys rock!

My latest design for the Vassar Farm, a concise, informational site, just went live. I am glad they let me kept the little girl. Isn’t she adorable?

I’ve also been working with the web team to redesign the Vassar homepage, which should launch at the end of the month. It’s going to be mad wicked!