Taking a Break From Typographically Trịnh

With 10 new quotes added, Typographically Trịnh is now up to day 40. The project started 33 days ago, which means I am seven days ahead of schedule. After many sleepless hours devoted to making and remaking the pieces, I am feeling the burn; therefore, I am taking a break from it.

A bigger reason to walk away from the project for a bit is that I have exhausted my type options. Typekit has 16 typefaces that have Vietnamese characters. Even though I had mixed them up to create different combinations, I am running out of choices to work with. I even cheated a bit by using non-Vietnamese-supported typefaces for words that do not required diacritical marks. For example, “cho nhau,” “say,” and “em” do not required any Vietnamese character. Although “Bé,” “từ bi” and “và” need an acute and grave, they already built into the Latin alphabet.

My hope is that Typekit will add more Vietnamese typefaces in the near future. On the other hand, I am extremely disappointed with Google Fonts. They still haven’t fixed issue on iOS Safari. Other type designers pointed out this issue 18 days ago. I noticed this issue many months ago and they still have not fixed the problem. If this issue happened at Typekit, they would have jumped on it already. Google Fonts offers a handful of new typefaces for Vietnamese language, but the display issue make them useless on the web. Google, please fix the problem.