On February 4, 2006, I launched a slideshow based on “Bonjour Vietnam,” a French song recorded by Phạm Quỳnh Anh. With gorgeous photography of Vietnam accompanying beautiful melody, the slideshow went viral around the world. Now, 18 years later, I revisit the project and put together a sample page for my Vietnamese Typography book site. The main text is set in Herbik, designed by Daniel Veneklaas, and display text is set in Lavishe, designed by Dương Trần.

I was just making some edits to my web book and ended up changing the title from Professional Web Typography to Pro Web Type. The main reason was that Professional Web Typography was so hard to set on the homepage. The way the three words broke, which had a huge gap in the middle, bugged me. I couldn’t set the cover as big as I could. Pro Web Type is shorter and matched the web address of the book; therefore, I just went for it. Obviously I had to make some visual changes as well to make it look good.

In her book titled Mỗi ngày gửi cậu một cái ôm (Each Day I Send You a Hug), Là Trang shares 108 positive, thoughtful messages to the youths to help them navigate through life. Even as an adult, I find her words compelling; therefore, I quoted a few lines and added my own English translation. I created this sample page to share her positive thoughts. For typesetting, I selected Montagu Slab, designed by Florian Karsten.

I was reading Pete the Cat’s Groovy Guide to Life, by Kimberly and James Dean, with my five-year-old son, who chose the book from the library, and falling in love with the quotes the author had compiled. I decided to translate the quotes into Vietnamese and created a sample page with both languages. To make it groovy, I chose vibrant colors for each quote and typeset in Calistoga, designed by Yvonne Schüttler and Eben Sorkin, combined with Neue DIN, by Hendrik Weber, Andreas Frohloff, and Olli Meier. Check out Hướng dẫn đi đến nếp sống hấp dẫn.

I added SLS Network to my case studies.

I redesigned the lock-up for the 24^th Annual Judicial & Legislative Reception. I reduced the typeface to Minion Display.

I revealed the beautiful designer behind Simplexpression.

I created a new Vietnamese typography sample.

I made the logo much bigger at the bottom. I also added a red bow on top of it.

Anh Cầm Fact’s Lì Quá Để Nói Quài is a pocket-size book filled with Vietnamese quips and wordplays. I enjoyed the prose so much that I had to create a sample page with my personal favorite quotes. The page is typeset in Bricolage Grotesque, by Mathieu Triay. Enjoy the quotes!

This is the fifth design iteration of my blog. As skiing-snowboarding season coming to an end, I want to remove the vibrant graphics and focus on the typography. I have been wanting to use Lang, designed by Stephen Nixon, for a while, but the quirky yet beautiful semi-slab type family is not intended for reading text.

Lang might not work at small size, but it looks great at large size. I dialed the body text up a notch and I loved how it took up the space. I am also getting old; therefore, larger font size works for me.

To complement Lang, I tried Lang Gothic, which is Lang’s cousin. I did not realize that Lang Gothic has no support for Vietnamese yet. I am not sure when Stephen will add Vietnamese diacritics for Lang Gothic; therefore, I went with Name Sans, which is also designed by Stephen.

As I was already using Stephen’s two typefaces, I might as well add Recursive Mono, another typeface of his, to the mix. I used Recursive Mono primary for code samples.

As for the colors, I went with the dark mode to fit my mood at this time. I am going through a dark time. I hope I can pull through it.

The latest design of this blog dedicates to snowboarding, a sport I am obsessed with. I just can’t wait to hit the slopes. I don’t have much else to say. If you want to follow my journey, check out my YouTube Shorts or subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

Grilli Type Foundry:

The Standard GT Pressura encoding now supports 196 Latin-based languages. We’re also offering a Vietnamese add-on to complement the typeface, created in consultation with Donny Trương.

It was my pleasure to play an advising role in GT Pressura.

Hôm nay đổi hình ảnh trên trang blog này cho có một chút cảnh Tết. Chúc các bạn viếng thăm trang blog này năm mới an khang thịnh vượng. Gia đình vui vẻ thân mật đừng lạnh nhạt với nhau. Tết trên xứ người cũng chẳng biết làm gì. Thôi thì tự mình ca nhạc Việt đăng lên tự mình nghe. Chỉ có thế thôi.