Brand identity for the National Security Institute at Antonin Scalia Law School. Typeset in League Gothic, designed by Tyler Finck, Caroline Hadilaksono, and Micah Rich. Even though this is not the official logo for NSI, I like to keep it for my portfolio.
A few years ago, my mother’s youngest sister shared with me stories she had written about her parents, sisters, and brother. She wrote about their lives in great detail and her narrative came from her heart and memory. The stories helped me understand their legacies; therefore, I asked her permission to preserve them in online book format so we can share them with the younger generations. I edited her stories in Vietnamese and English. I put the website together. I also came up with the book title. Familý was a play on my mother’s family name: Lý. For the visual identity, I pulled together NaN Serf and its sibling NaN Serf Sans, designed by Daria Cohen, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, and Florian Runge.
My father was a builder. When I was a kid, he took me on the roads to watch him built houses, temples, and theaters with his crew. In his tribute wordmark, Hồ Hữu Tỷ (his name) fit together like a building block. I love the way squares and circles are built together to make up Megazoid, designed by David Jonathan Ross.
Yesterday, I decided to rework and refine the wordmark for Scalia Law’s Career & Academic Services. It is set in Acumin Variable, designed by Robert Slimbach, to give give a nice and balanced text block. The colors came from Scalia Law’s branding.
The name Vũ Thành An is synonymous with “Những bài không tên,” a series of untitled Vietnamese love songs. Because these songs were written about his past lovers, the famed Vietnamese musician and composer didn’t want to reveal their names. The first ten songs in the series had been covered countless of times by several generations of Vietnamese singers. The rest hadn’t been recorded much; therefore, I would like to put together a collection so the pieces can be read as poems. Even though the series has 112 songs, many of them are missing. I collected as many of them as I could find. For typesetting, I selected NaN Druid and Nan Druid Sans, designed by Anna Khorash and Reymund Schröder. Enjoy reading!
I had always wanted to translate Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go into Vietnamese, but I hadn’t found the time. Fortunately, Nhã Thuyên beat me to it and she had done the justice in capturing Dr. Seuss’s uplifting prose. In this typographic sample, I wanted to showcase both languages side by side. I also keep the color scheme from the book. Since the focus is on typography, I left off the illustrations. The sample page is typeset in NaN Success, designed by Jérémy Landes, and NaN Serf, designed by Daria Cohen, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, and Florian Runge. Now you can enjoy Dr. Seuss’s classic in Vietnamese as well.
The moral guides in Lisa 0. Engelhardt’s Right and Wrong and Being Strong are applicable not only for kids, but also for adults. I had learned a thing or two from this Elf-help book. Since Minh Hiền has done an exceptional job of translating the original text into Vietnamese, I decided to create a typographic sample page to showcase both languages. For typesetting, I settled on Thow, designed by Dương Trần, a young and rising type designer living in Hà Nội, Việt Nam.
Quốc Bảo’s 9 Bài Ru is a series of nine songs titled “Ru” (Lull). On the record, the melodies are melancholy and the lyrics are alluring. On the page, Quốc Bảo’s words become poetry. Through minimal arrangements, Nguyên Hà, Phạm Hoài Nam, and June Nguyễn had done an excellent job of telling his stories with their captivating vocals. Through typography, however, readers get the direct experience from his words. They don’t have to follow the singers. They can read at their own pace and draw their own stories through the rain, the storm, and the lover. For the lyrics, I chose Jean-Baptiste Morizo’s NaN Tragedy, specifically the italic type because it sings. For display text, I settled on Robert Leuschke’s Love Light for its swelling cursiveness. Enjoy 9 poems of “Ru.”
Ann Lưu-Trọng is a storyteller. Through her len, she captures the beauty of isolation, displacement, and solitude. Her photography is often mysterious and ambiguous—leaving her visual narratives open to interpretation.
To showcase her work, I settled on a dark mode. The user interface recedes to the background to put the attention on the photography. The homepage features an automated slideshow to display a wide range of her work while the individual galleries showcase specific themes.
For typography, I chose Roboto Flex, designed by David Berlow, Santiago Orozco, Irene Vlachou, Ilya Ruderman, Yury Ostromentsky, and Mikhail Strukov, for its robustness and no-nonsense finesse.
The site is designed and developed using HTML, CSS, and bit of PHP. The galleries are powered by Flickity, developed by David DeSandro.
Part of the Suisse superfamily, Suisse Int’l, designed by Ian Party, is rooted in the Swiss legacy, which emerged around the schools in Basel and Zürich in the 1950s. As a sans-serif workhorse with 18 fonts, Suisse Int’l offers versatility and flexibility for playful as well as purposeful typesetting. Suisse Int’l is equipped with sturdy diacritics. For Vietnamese, its acute, grave, and hook above stack to the right of its circumflex.
