After more than a decade of trying to choose images that convey diversity for the school that named after the ultra conservative Supreme Court Justice, I lost my passion for working with photography. Fortunately, Angela Riechers’ The Elements of Visual Grammar reinvigorated my long-lost love for the art of imagery. The text is clearly written and the accompanied images helped conveyed the message. I recommend it for design students and professionals.

For April, David Jonathan Ross sent out Job Clarendon Text to members of the Font of the Month Club. As much as I appreciated David’s wild display typefaces, I always loved when he sent us text faces. Job Clarendon started out as a display typeface for huge text such as posters and flyers, but now the text version pushes the slab serif family to a whole new level. Finding a slab serif text face is isn’t easy. Finding a slab serif text face with the full Vietnamese diacritics is just so rare. Of course, I have to feature it on the type recommendation section of Vietnamese Typography.

It had been a year already since I installed a new water heater. As I am typing up this document, I am draining the water from the tank. Here’s my flushing process:

1. Turn off the electric power
2. Shut off the cold water valve that goes into the tank
3. Connect the hose at the bottom of the tank
4. Open the hot side faucet in the basement bathroom and kitchen sink
5. Flip up the relief valve on the tank to release air
6. Turn on the valve at the bottom of the tank where the hose is connect it
7. Let it drain and wait (do something else like writing this blog post
8. Check the expansion tank to make sure the water pressure matched the main water pressure, which is 48 to 50 PSI
9. Turn on the cold water valve on and off several times (once the tank is completely drained) to flush out more sediment
10. Close the valve and disconnect the hose
11. Turn the cold water valve on the tank back on
12. Flip the relief valve down once the water reached halfway or higher
13. Turn off the sink valves in the basement bathroom and kitchen
14. Turn the power back on

It was not a bad process. I will do it every year to make sure the tank is in good shape and the water is clean. If you haven’t tried it yet, check out this video.

Big shout out to the team at Fontwerk for picking up the iF Design Award 2024 for Neue DIN. I contributed a small part in Neue DIN’s Vietnamese diacritics. I wish Neue DIN has an oblique companion so I can feature it in type recommendation section of Vietnamese Typography. Congratulations, nevertheless!

Sheila Ngọc Phạm has written an article on Vietnamese diacritics for Disegno. She mentions my book, Vietnamese Typography:

In response to Nguyễn’s New York Times footnote, designer Donny Trương, who is based in Arlington, Virginia, reformatted her article to show it is possible to include the full set of Vietnamese diacritics. To achieve this, he used the typefaces Kaius, Job Clarendon and Change, designed respectively by Lisa Fischbach, David Jonathan Ross and Bethany Heck, and Alessio Leonardi. The reformatted version of Nguyễn’s piece is published in Trương’s ebook Vietnamese Typography (2015), which is free to read and regularly updated, and features an ever-growing ‘Samples’ section. Nguyễn’s article now looks and reads as it should.

Vietnamese Typography was originally written as Trương’s Master’s thesis at George Mason University School of the Arts, and was born out of the frustration he felt about the lack of Vietnamese diacritics in modern typefaces. It has since become an invaluable resource, particularly for non-Vietnamese type designers interested in designing typefaces that support Vietnamese, which has the most diacritics of any language with Romanised script. These diacritics are not just marks above one letter, as is the case with common diacritics in European languages (e.g. é, à, ö); in Vietnamese, the complexity is due to the way in which diacritics are also stacked on top of each other (e.g. ổ, ề). There is also the diacritic that appears below letters, as you can see in my name, and with letters that have existing diacritics (e.g. ậ, ệ). In his book, Trương outlines some of the design challenges this presents: “The marks must be consistent in the entire font system to create uninterrupted flow of text. The strokes of the marks have to work well with the base letters to help readers determine the meaning of words. They must not get in the way of the base letter and collide with adjacent letters. Considering balance, harmony, space, position, placement, contrast, size, and weight, designers must overcome each challenge to create a successful typeface for Vietnamese.”

The entire article will be available on the web later this year.

Last Saturday, we pulled together our first community sale. A week before, I started to collect everything we hadn’t used in years including toys, books, rollerblades, bikes, helmets, vases, shoes, and everything in between. I was excited to get rid of the things that I had wanted to throw away for a while.

The sale started at 8:00 am, but I woke up around 6:00 to get everything ready. Most of the things I just wanted to give away, especially mix boxes of toys. Once I had everything set up, I asked Đạo and Đán to be in charge of the sales. They could keep whatever they sold. Only Đạo was willing to do the sales.

At 10:00 am, he made about $30. Then the rain started to pour. We had to cover everything with the tarps. The rain stopped around 11:30 am. We opened business back up, but couldn’t sell anything. We kept all the free stuff out for grab, but no one picked up anything.

On Sunday, we continued to put all the free stuff out while my wife posted a few items on Facebook’s Marketplace. We made more money through Facebook’s Marketplace than on our driveway. On Monday, I took all the unwanted boxes to Goodwill.

It felt great to be able to get rid of so much junk in our basement. For 15 years, I always dreaded all the stuff that we had collected and could not let go. I didn’t want to hurt my wife’s feelings, but I started to feel stressed out everytime I wanted to tidy up our place.

We still need to get rid of more things, but I will try to sell them through Facebook’s Marketplace. As for community sale, it was our first and our last.

Typeset in Degular and Swear, designed by James Edmondson, Elliot Jay Stocks’s book is a lovely printed publication on web typography. The book features 100 clearly written principles accompanied by beautiful illustrations to help readers understand the key concepts.

From typographic fundamentals to choosing and pairing fonts to typography systems to OpenType and variable fonts, this book is a comprehensive guide to typography. Even though Elliot focuses on typesetting for the web, his principles can apply to other mediums as well.

His writing is friendly and his approach to typography is flexible. There are no hard rules in setting types. His principles serve as guides and not regulations. You just have to do it and get a feel for it. For example, he argues that long-form text can be set in either serif or sans serif typefaces, as he illustrated in the typesetting of his own book. I still prefer serif for long-form reading, especially for books with just text. The simplicity of sans-serif text always made me read too fast and skipped the words. I had to consciously tell myself to slow down. On the other hand, serif typefaces made me read slower, but retain the information better. That’s just my own experience.

If you are a design student or interested in improving your typesetting, Universal Principles of Typography is highly recommended. Thanks for the shout out to Vietnamese Typography.

Last week, Robin Rendle launched The Cascade, a member supported blog about the past, present, and future of CSS. I didn’t hesitate to become a member to support his work.

I have been following Robin’s writing for a while. I subscribed to his personal site and newsletters. Robin is a skillful writer. Even when he writes about typography and CSS, his style is always approachable. Furthermore, I always appreciated his honesty in life, design, and career.

I am glad that he started The Cascade so I can keep myself up to date with CSS features that I haven’t heard of yet. I have not followed the web industry since the rise of frameworks like React. I am still crafting my webpages by hands with semantic markups and CSS presentations. This approach is still accessible and fast.

When I heard George Mason working on the rebranding a few years ago, I predicted it wouldn’t be good. Today the new logo was revealed and it’s shockingly bad.

The university claims to create a brand for the future, but the “GM” monogram appears to be stuck in the 80s. The use of green and gold colors on the outlined typeface makes the monogram appear more amateurish than prestigious and more athletic than academic.

The connection between “G” and “M” doesn’t feel natural. The two letters were forced together instead of being “All Together Different” as the university has claimed.

Now we are stuck with a bad brand. Let’s see how long it will last.

My Dearest Đạo,

It is hard to believe you are turning 15. I used to hold your tiny body in my arms and now you are even taller than me. You are becoming a fine young man. I might be strict on you at times, but I am proud of you.

Thank you for helping me out when I needed a hand. I can rely on you to complete the job. I ask for your help so you can learn to work with your hands. When I was your age, I didn’t fix anything around the house. I ended up not knowing much.

When we first moved into our house, which was when you were born, I hesitated to repair anything. Unfortunately, hiring a handyman these days is much more expensive than my own income. I ended up learning as much as I could from watching YouTube videos and trials and errors.

I used to lack the confidence to fix things on my own because I was afraid of making them worse. I don’t want you to lack the confidence like I did. Having some extra skills on your hands will always be useful. You don’t need to depend on others to do the jobs for you.

In sports, you are a fantastic skier. I loved shredding on the mountains with you. I hope we can continue to do so in many more winters to come. If you ever decided to pick up snowboarding, I can give you some tips.

I hope I drilled enough in your head about the importance of education. Call us old school, but your mom and I still believe that education is the standard for having a good life later on. When I was your age, I was more interested in getting that piece of paper than learning, which was my mistake. If you have to go to school anyway, you might as well learn as much as you can. Again, don’t be like me. I learned more after I graduated than I did when I was in school.

In regard to our digital consumption, I am deeply concerned, but I also understand it is hard to pull away from our screens. I didn’t do a very good job of guiding you and your brothers through the digital temptations. As you are getting more mature, I hope that you can manage and balance your time.

Happy birthday, my oldest son. I love you with all my heart.
Dad