Design - Nam Vu Personal Site

September 8, 2022

Shout out to Portainer.io for the UI facelift

As an avid Portainer user and a UI designer, I just want to give a shout out to whoever worked on Portainer 2.15’s new UI facelift. They truly did a great job. Not only does it LOOK better, it actually addresses some of the minor annoyance that existed in the old UI.

2.15 ui home comparison — Environment Page comparison

2.15 ui addregistry comparison — Registry Page comparison

Now to be clear, the old UI wasn’t trash or anything, it was pretty okay, but it wasn’t GREAT. And while it didn’t affect the way Portainer works, there were some minor visual bugs that bother UI designers and/or hardcore nitpicking perfectionists, and I just happen to be both.

Take the App Templates page for example. In the old version, there were no constraints set for the app icons, and since they come in all shapes and sizes, they often get stretched and distorted beyond recognition, making the page looking very amateurish.

That’s no longer the case

March 29, 2022

Logic Pro X theme for Audacity

If you recall I actually attempted to touch on this subject once in the past. That was back when I still used Photoshop for UI design, so that little screenshot took me like 3 days or something. Today I’m attempting to do it again but in Figma and see if I could do something similar in 3 hours.

What if Audacity has a theme that used the same design language as Apple’s Logic Pro X?

August 22, 2021

Enhancing OpenMediaVault’s sidebar

Replaced Rockstor with OMG on my little ChocolateBox NAS. At first glance it appears to be better than Rockstor in pretty much every way except the front end. As a designer I’m always greatly bothered by subpar UIs, even those belonging to FOSS. Just spent an hour or two reimagining this part of OMV if it was created with a more modern design language:

omv sidebar 1 — Lato + Carbon Icons is not a bad combination. The primary may remain the same, for now.

December 21, 2020

The Results are in!

Figma is now the king in interface design industry. It didn’t just overtake Sketch, it pretty much buried it six feet under. Not only that, it even managed to buried other competitors in other category too. Like prototyping (which was pioneered and led by InVision for the longest time) and handoff (something that was typically handled by Zeplin).

Figma’s lead in almost every single category in the design process is a testament to what the designers truly want: more feature in a single, unified package rather than super specialized tools that focus on a single aspect of the design process.

Don’t get me wrong though, specialized tools have their uses, and I’d argue their places are quite indispensable. But they are more useful in large studios with extended work pipelines where there are people dedicated to certain parts of the process.

June 18, 2020

404 Not Found Page

Which one should I choose?

LfFBMmc

April 2, 2020

Figma UI Recreation Challenge #1: Streamlabs Dashboard

Once in a while I’d come across a screenshot of a cool UI that I think would be relatively simple to recreate in Figma, so I made it a personal challenge to do so. This is not something that I do in my spare time or anything because, quite frankly I don’t have any spare time anymore. This is more of a distraction to prevent me from going insane between juggling 3 different major projects atm.

I will first start with 2 Streamlabs dashboard screens.

February 16, 2020

Yet Another GIMP UI Rework (2020 Edition WIP)

After all these years, I’ve come to the fact that GIMP is now a lost cause. It used to be a ‘Photoshop alternative’, but after years of stagnation it’s now having its butt kicked by even another open source image editor (Krita).

Nonetheless it’s still one of my all-time favorite editor, mostly due to nostalgia’s sake (I was a well-known tutorial writer back in the 2000s for the GIMP, you know, back when written tutorials were still a thing). And I especially take joy in reworking its UI. This, I do admit, is due to that fact that its interface is so godawful that ANY changes you make to it is an improvement. Whenever I feel bored or depressed, I rework

I did a GIMP UI rework some odd years ago. The project never finished due to time constraints, as I had other obligations to attend to. But that was when designers were creating UIs on Photoshop (I shivers as I remember those times). I think I blew like a week on that project. Fun times, hah.

Times had changed. We have dedicated UI design tools these days. I spent like a few hours on Figma already have more progress than I did in a week with the last project. And this was done completely on Linux! Something that was impossible the last time.

Here’s a quick sneak peak of the current WIP.

May 11, 2019

Full Dark-mode: ya or na?

So if you’ve been following my works recently you’d notice that for the last couple of months I’ve been working with nothing but dashboards. And for most of them I tend to use bright, vivid colors. Why? Well because they’re considered safe for most clients.

But during recent years, dark mode seems to be all the rage. Everybody started implementing it, Telegram, Slack, Skype. So when tasked with creating yet another crypto dashboard design, I thought to myself: “how about jumping on the bandwagon?”

So I quickly whipped up some screens, what do you guys think?