America

F.H. Buckley, Foundation Professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School, has written a limited series titled America: The Unknown Country. He needed a simple website to tell the unique history of America.

Design

Since the goal is to provide information including synopsis, historical research, and story setting, the site needs to be clean, simple, accessible, and fast. Typography plays a huge role in the design. Oswald, designed by Vernon Adams, is a sturdy sans-serif typeface with a classic gothic style. Spectral, by Production Type, is a beautiful, readable typeface.

With a modest budget, Buckley could have thrown the site together and put it on Squarespace, but he chose my service instead. The result is that his doesn’t look like one of Squarespace’s thousands of templated designs. These days, I can spot a Squarespace website without even looking at the code.

Praise

It’s pretty easy to get roped in by web designers who over-promise and over-charge. Compared to them, Mr. Truong is the gold standard. He does fantastic work, on time, and at a fraction of the cost that other people charge. He’s got a tremendous technical expertise and, what is rare, a real aesthetic sense that is very important in web design. It’s all about how it looks, and a techie who lacks it will produce a site that no one will see. I gave Mr. Truong free rein and he came up with something really attractive I could not have imagined myself.