Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s những tin tức về một ngôi làng (chronicles of a village) is a historical fiction based on a nameless village and told through a nameless scribe. The entire novel is written in lowercase letters and without any periods to give an oral tradition of storytelling. The series of story are fragmented mixing mythology with history. I selected a few chapters to introduce this fascinating work of literary. I included Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s original Vietnamese text as well as Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s outstanding English translation. The sample is typeset in Newsreader, designed by Hugues Gentile and Jean-Baptiste Levée. Check out the Vietnamese-English typographic sample page.

Allow me to reintroduce my blog. The 2026 redesign of Visualgui.com has launched. As usual, I would like to give my blog a new look at least once a year around December. In these last few years, however, skiing and snowboarding had taken up my time. Furthermore, I became attached to the 2025 rendition. Nevertheless, I needed to make a change. I have to keep my site fresh and I have to keep up my web design and development games.

One of the nice things about working on my own project is that I have no expectations. I could make any changes I wanted, though I rarely moved away from legibility and readability. It’s a blog; therefore, text has to be the primary focus and I always love using new typefaces.

The Visualgui 2026 redesign is inspired by Dương Trần, a young, promising type designer living and making fonts in Hà Nội, Việt Nam. I got to know him from FutureFonts, where I licensed his fonts. He recently updated Lavishe, an elegant serif face. Even though Lavishe is still a work in progress, it has enough weights and matching italics to be used on a production site. Lavishe has not only beautiful characters, but also lovely diacritical marks. I have to use it on my site.

In searching for a pairing for Lavishe, I returned to FutureFonts and found Siryous, Trần’s work-in-progress monospaced sans-serif. I licensed it. Even though Siryous isn’t fully developed, it has enough glyphs for what I need for my blog. I can’t wait for future updates of this typeface.

For the blog layout, I wanted to return to the grid system. I even brought back the sidebar to give the vibe of a blog. No, blog is not dead yet—at least not for me. After 23 years, I still love blogging.

I experimented with different colors. I almost settled on a fresh green, but I pulled back to black and white. I just love how Lavishe is read on a crisp, clean, white background. I also offered the dark mode for those who like to read white text on black background. I don’t have a switch button. It goes along with your preference setting.

I applied CSS grid and fluid layout to take up the entire browser. I put a limit on the width of paragraph text to keep readability, but the layout has no maximum width. I opened up the design and bumped up the text size. Yes, I am getting old and I need the text to be large enough to read.

The redesign of Visualgui 2026 doesn’t break any new ground, but for the first time my blog is set in typefaces designed by a Vietnamese type designer. For someone who has been promoting the enrichment and expansion of “Vietnamese Typography,” I can’t ask for more. Keep up the excellent work, Dương Trần.

I just gave my professional site a typographic update for 2026.

For a while, I had been wanting to use the NaN Holo family, designed by Luke Prowse, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, and Fátima Lázaro, but I couldn’t find the right fit. I particularly love NaN Holo Mono, but it is a challenge to set as body text. As I was making some minor updates on my own site, donnytruong.com, I decided to just go for it.

Monospaced typefaces were designed for coding, but I wanted to try them for body copy and my site was the perfect place to experiment. After messing around with NaN Holo Mono, I started to like the way it reads as paragraph text.

For large headings, however, the black mono weight took up way too much space; therefore, I went with the compressed black weight and it swells.

The NaN Holo family doesn’t come with italics. I use small caps for emphasis instead. In addition, I had always wanted to style my links with underlined small caps so I went ahead and implemented it.

On the homepage, I removed my photo. It is definitely personable to have a photo on a professional site, but I don’t have any good ones of myself.

I hope you enjoy the new change. Check out donnytruong.com.

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư is a littérateur of short stories who has a distinctive style of capturing the language of Southern Vietnamese, particularly in the Mekong Delta. Her stories are often heavy on social issues and injustices. After reading her collection of short stories in Đong tấm lòng, I decided to pull a few of my personal favorites to create a Vietnamese typographic sample. The main text is set in Hahmlet, designed by Minjoo Ham and Mark Frömberg. For the title cover, I chose Smooch, designed by Robert Leuschke. Special thanks to Nhựt Trường for requesting me to create a sample page for Nguyễn Ngọc Tư and for recommending me to read Đong tấm lòng. Check out “Giữa người với người”.

I am excited to announce the launch of a landing page for my passionate work as a ski & ride instructor at Whitetail Resort, which is part of Vail Resorts.

I want to share a bit about my journey to skiing and snowboarding. I also want to share my coaching progressions for both sports so guests will know what they will learn from me.

For the design, I had to go with the jacket blue. For all Vail instructors, blue is the color of our uniforms. For typesetting, I had to go with Roslindale, designed by David Jonathan Ross.

Check out my new site, book a lesson, and come ski or ride with me.

A few months ago, I listed my Ski & Snowboard Services on Facebook’s Marketplace. A week later, Facebook removed my list for violating its policy. I was not allowed to post services. I didn’t know. Now I know.

In the last few days of 2025, I decided to put together a webpage for Donny Trương’s Ski & Snowboarding Services. It only took me a few hours, but I enjoyed designing it. I took all the photos to show my process. The site is typeset in NaN Tresor, designed by Christoph Koeberlin.

Now I just link this page to the DMV ski groups. Take a look at Donny Trương’s Ski & Snowboarding Services.

Happy New Year! Let’s kick off 2026 with some strength.

In 2011, I had the opportunity to work with Activist and Author Jennifer Karin on her websites and print materials. In late December of 2011, Ms. Karin sent me her “Strength” card to redesign. I loved her prose; therefore, I asked her if I could put together a digital version that could be hosted on my site. She generously granted me permission.

In the last few days of 2025, I decided to revive the “Strength” page. In addition, I would like to translate Ms. Karin’s words into Vietnamese. I redesigned the page and typeset in Lang and Lang Gothic, designed by Stephen Nixon. Take a look at “Strength: Nghị lực”

Nguyễn Nhật Ánh is a prolific Vietnamese writer who has been known for his young adult novels. Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ, his acclaimed novella, has been translated into English, Ticket to Childhood, by William Naythons. To give a sample of the book, I selected three chapters and set them in Vollkorn, designed by Friedrich Althausen, and Kuhlman, designed by David Jonathan Ross. Although Kuhlman is a work-in-progress typeface, its rough edges work great for the cover title. Vollkorn was one of the early open-source typefaces that supported Vietnamese. I have been wanted to showcase Vollkorn for a long time. I finally got a chance to use this beautiful, readable text face for this project.

HaH! Chili is founded by my wife Dana Nguyễn and Donny Trương. We love chili sauce that adds a kick to our dishes. We made small patches of chili sauce to share with our friends and family members. Now we would like to share them with you.

I can’t remember when I started to add chili sauce into every meal, but nowadays a meal wouldn’t be complete without it. I tried almost every chili sauce on the shelf at the supermarket. Most of them were not spicy at all and some of them were too spicy. All of them included preservatives. As a result, they lost their freshness.

When I came to America 34 years ago, I always had to have Huy Fong’s Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce with my phở. A few years ago when the Sriracha shortage happened, its price spiked. Dana Nguyễn, my wife, decided to make her own chili sauce with all the peppers she harvested from our little garden. When she asked me to try it, I was hooked. I loved the pure, fresh taste with a kick that enhanced every dish, including phở. I haven’t turned back to Huy Fong’s Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce since.

At every party I went to, I brought out my wife’s chili sauce to introduce to family and friends. They were hooked as well and requested for more. In the last few years, my wife refined her craft of making chili sauce. She sourced all of the peppers from her sister’s garden. She made small patches to share with our family and friends. I asked her, “Why don’t we share our chili sauce with the world?”

She just needs to focus on making the chili sauce and I will take care of the brand, the design, and, of course, the website. That’s how HaH! Chili is founded. It’s our partnership and passion for something that we love.

HaH! has a surprised, joyful expression. Our chili sauce will make you go “HaH!”. The hidden meaning is that our chili sauce is Hot as Hell! You’ll find out when you give it a try. Once we established the name for our chili sauce, the first thing I did was designing the bottle label. I wanted the label to be as simple as possible. The label only consists of the wordmark, the name of the product, and the web address. I want to keep all the product information on our website.

For our branding wordmark, I didn’t have to try out any typefaces. I already had in mind the NaN Rage superfamily, designed by the NaN team (Hugues Gentile, Fanny Hamelin, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, Florian Runge, Jolana Sýkorová). The logo is set in Nan Rage Zipp. The product names and headers are set in NaN Rage Quik. The copy and body text are set in NaN Rage Soft. I just loved the flexibility the eccentricity the NaN Rage superfamily offered.

Take a look at our brand new HaH! Chili website and treat yourself a bottle of two of our Hot as Hell! chili sauce. Our supply is limited. So grab them while they are still fresh.

TJ is a dear friend of mine and an exceptional contractor who runs his own home-improvement business. He takes pride in getting things right and on time. He has a solid work ethic and the results of his outcomes speak for themselves. He transforms old places into dream spaces for his clients.

He showed me his projects on his phone and I suggested that he needed to put them on his website. He had a website, but it was outdated and he didn’t bother to renew it. His website went offline in May 2024 and I offered to reinvigorate it, but he declined. Then suddenly, several weeks ago, he took up my offer. Similar to what he had done for his clients’ homes, I gave his digital home a new life.

The goal for the website is to show off his projects. The homepage features a responsive slideshow that displays two sets of images. On small screens, only vertical photos are displayed. On large screens, only horizontal photos are displayed. This method, which uses the HTML Picture element, solves the issue of tiny landscape photos on small screens or large portrait photos on large screens.

For the showroom section, all photos are displayed for potential clients to scroll through at their own leisure to see how TJ helped his clients reimagine their dream homes—together.

One of his recent clients had written a genuine review of the project they worked on together. She even took photos, which look professional. To show their fruitful collaborative effort, I put together a page. It was indeed, “A Dream Kitchen Realized.”

TJ Home Improvements website is typeset in Colophon Foundry’s DM Sans, which was based on Indian Type Foundry’s Poppins, designed by Jonny Pinhorn. DM Sans is a low-contrast geometric sans serif family with a simple, modern vibe.

TJ wanted to keep his original logo, which he created himself, but he handed me a low-quantity JPG file. I redrew it based on a grid system and reset the type using Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger.

TJ is thrilled with his new website. Even though he lands most of his contracts through word of mouth, the website showcases his body of work. If you live in the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) area and would like to remodel your home, I highly recommend TJ Home Improvements. Don’t take my words for it, just take a look at the TJ Home Improvements website.