Back in April 2020, I had the pleasure of reviewing the Vietnamese diacritical marks for GT Pressura, designed by Marc Kappeler and Dominik Huber. I am so glad to see the type family being refreshed and expanded, according to the release note:

The Extended subfamily gives GT Pressura room to breathe, embracing a more organic rhythm with a variety of character widths. In its departure from GT Pressura’s strict beginnings, the type becomes more elegant and “more Swiss Style,” according to Moiré. Extended has the approachable proportions of a modernist grotesque typeface with completely mechanical design details.

The mini-site is just lovely. Take a look!

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.

With Portada, ​​Veronika Burian and José Scaglione set out to create a serif family that’s as clear and readable as a sans family in digital environments. Portada is designed specifically for user interfaces as well as long reading online. Portada has extended its support for Vietnamese. In working with Vik and José on Vietnamese diacritics for Portada, I caught a glimpse of how the two talented designers collaborated. They lived up to their foundry’s name: TypeTogether.

For August’s Font of the Month, David Jonathan Ross sent his members his revival of Glyptic from the Victorian era. In his digitized interpretation, David retains many of Glyptic’s ornamentations. Even with the diacritical marks, he incorporates delicate spirals and curlicues. It was such a joy for me to work with him on Vietnamese diacritics for Glyptic DJR. If you are into typography, I highly recommend David’s Font of the Month Club.

Tapping into the rich typographic and stylistic history of baroques, Garaldes, transitional, and modern categories, Atlante is a conventional-yet-excessive serif family for text and display with carefully crafted diacritics for Vietnamese. Its acute stacks high to the left of its circumflex. Its grave stacks high to the right of its circumflex. Its hook above stacks to the right of its circumflex.

I had the pleasure of working with Martin Sesto and Yorlmar Campos on Vietnamese diacritics for Atlante.

My kids joined Liên Đoàn Hùng Vương, a Vietnamese Scout Pack in Northern Virginia, a few years ago. During their weekly activities, they often sang Vietnamese Scout songs from a small booklet. The kids and adults often lost these booklets; therefore, I wanted to create a digital version they can use on their phone. For friendly reading, I chose Bree, designed by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione. For the design, I took the colors from the Liên Đoàn Hùng Vương logo. I also used the details element in HTML to reveal and collapse the lyrics quickly. It’s a fun, little project that I can reference when I join them to sing. I hope I can memorize all the songs. Take a look.

Dr. Mỹ An T. Nguyễn and I go all the way back to elementary school when we were two new kids immigrated from Việt Nam. Right from the start when took ESL (English as a Second Language) classes together, I knew she would become successful later in life. Despite her limited English, she excelled in all subjects from elementary throughout high school.

After more than two decades of losing contact, we rekindled our friendship. As I had predicted, she has become a successful optometrist who runs two eye-care offices. When she reached out to this old friend of hers to help redesign her website, I could not refuse. Her goal is to showcase both of Everlasting Eye Care offices on one website. She also wanted her site to be easy on the eyes with personal attention in the message.

In our initial conversation, I could tell that Dr. Nguyễn cares deeply about her patients. She wants to enhance people’s quality of life by improving their eye health. In revamping her website, we featured a personal note from Dr. Nguyễn addressing to her patients right on the homepage. For the look and feel, we decided on a clean, crisp, and simple design with a straightforward and intuitive user experience.

The body text for the website is set in Lexend, designed by Bonnie Shaver-Troup, Thomas Jockin, Santiago Orozco, and Héctor Gómez, for comfort reading experience. Headers are set in Literata, designed by Vera Evstafieva, Veronika Burian, Irene Vlachou, and José Scaglione, for high-contrast display to grab readers’ attention.

As a bonus to an old friend, I created a new word mark for Everlasting Eye Care. I combined P22 Cezanne, designed by James Grieshaber and Michael Want, with Optician Sans, design by ANTI Hamar and Fábio Duarte Martins. While the fancy script, which based on Cezanne’s handwriting, provides a free, creating vision, the geometric sans, which based on the LogMAR Chart, provides legibility for visual acuity. The two contrasted typefaces complemented each other for the word mark.

With Dr. Nguyễn’s busy schedule, the site took a long time to launch, but it is my pleasure to redesign the new Everlasting Eye Care website for my friend.

Simplexpression, the website for my wife’s tiny jewelry design studio, gets a refresh. The goal for the update was to replace the typeface. Previously, the site was set in Mrs Eaves, designed by Zuzana Licko. While I always love Mrs Eaves, I don’t want to be depended on Adobe Fonts to serve the font files. I would like the font files to be on the same server.

Warbler, designed by David Jonathan Ross, is a perfect replacement. Warbler is beautiful and elegant. In addition, it is designed for digital screens. Since Simplexpression doesn’t have much text, I only use the beta version of the variable font to take the advantage of optical sizes for text as well as headings. The new logo is also set in Warbler. If you look closely at the logo, you might able to spot the subtle play on optical sizes.

The detail pages were redesigned using CSS Grid to align the photos side-by-side on large screens. In addition, dark mode was added to match the users’ system preference. Take a look and see if you find something you like.

When Type Designer David Jonathan Ross sent out Warbler Text to members of his Font of the Month Club, I immediately updated the body text of my blog.

Even though Warbler Text supported Vietnamese, there were some issues with diacritical marks, including collisions between the horn and the hook above and the horn and the tilde. David reached out to me to review Vietnamese diacritics for Warbler Text. I went through everything related to diacritical marks for Vietnamese and made a list of suggestions. A week later, David sent me an update with all the corrections for Vietnamese diacritics.

If you read Vietnamese on my blog, please do a hard refresh to get the new changes. Warbler Text is such a pleasure to read; therefore, I featured it in Vietnamese Typography. If you want to get a copy of Warbler Text, I highly recommend you join David’s Font of the Month Club. Full membership is only $6 a month. Discount membership for $2 a month is also available.

My mother’s brother passed away on Tuesday. I wrote a farewell piece in Vietnamese. His son, who is my cousin, asked me to put together a tribute website for his father, similar to the one I created for my mother. Of course, I agreed.

I took codes from mother’s site as a starting point. I wanted the same structure and layout, but completely different typography. I never thought I would ever use the Noto global family, due to its neutrality, but here I am. While Noto Serif text is pretty bland, its display companion is quite striking, especially the contrast between thick and thin. As a result, I use Noto Serif Display for big headlines and Noto Sans for body copy and small texts.

I hope it is a fitting tribute to my uncle. Rest in peace, uncle. We love you and miss you dearly.