Hoàng Thùy Linh Gets Typographic Treatment

After listening to Link, Hoàng Thùy Linh’s latest release, I wrote down hilarious lines just to amuse myself. I also revisited her previous album, Hoàng, released in 2019, which I like a bit more. Then I had the idea of creating a sample page for Vietnamese Typography based on these two albums.

My initial concept was to create a three-column grid layout for each song with image, lyrics, and pull-out quote in each column. I abandoned the concept because I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. Then I simplified it to just pull quotes and lyrics. I created the first song right in the browser and didn’t like the result. I cut out the lyrics and just put all the quotes together in one running text.

For typography, I selected Canicule Display, design by Kostas Bartsokas. Even though Culicule is still a work in progress, it comes nine weights and supports Vietnamese, which makes it usable for this project.

For photography, I went with a screen captured from her “Tứ phủ” video. I like the simplicity of this photo as well as the shades of pink, which is great to use as a background. To add a twist to the design, I flipped Hoàng Thùy Linh upside down as if she was hanging off from the top of the screen. Then I laid the quotes from each song over her.

The result was quite striking and different from what I had done before. I head toward a typographical exploration rather than a readable presentation. Even though this tiny project ate up more of my sleep time than I had anticipated, I found it gratifying. I want to experiment with more playful typography for the web. Take a look at the final design.