Well, not only talking about them, but I also spend really long time drawing font families. As a native speaker, I sometimes work with type designers and foundries on Vietnamese localisation projects. Some of my clients: Dinamo, Vincent Chan (Matter of Sorts), Modern Type, Wei Huang...
On weekends, I hang out with Lưu Chữ, my Vietnamese typography group. And occasionally I run my personal type design practice – Mai Type.
If you’d like to test out a typeface, feel free to shoot me a message.
Typefaces
Eyja
2021 to current
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In progress
Eyja is the first revival project I started during my Type@Cooper program in 2021. It is a serif typeface based on a typeface I found in an 1852 edition of "Visit to Iceland and The Scandinavian North" by the pioneering explorer Ida Pfeiffer.
Mighty Mono
2019 to current
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In progress
Mighty Mono is a low-contrast, geometric monospaced typeface. It is my interpretation with the letterforms that I have been familiar with since primary school in Vietnam, such as the ‘i’ with the little tail, or the single- storey ‘a’ and ‘g’.
Untitled Display
2018 to current
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In progress
Untitled Display is a reverse-contrast display sans inspired by the old hand-painted signages in Vietnam, which are well-known typography visual materials.
Featured Work & Achievements
The Malee Scholarship 2021 Finalist
2021
Last year I was honoured to be selected as one of three finalists of The Malee Scholarship 2021, a scholarship fund initiated and funded by Sharp Type, to support and empower women of colour in type design field.
Forward to the Past
2021
In Further Reading Print No.3, I wrote ‘Forward to the Past’, an essay on Vietnamese typography and my type journey. Seeing how type design is still perceived as a ‘Western-centric’ discipline, I hope to minimise the dissimilarity gap between the markets in the future.
Typographic solution for Rarau mai Living city
2021
Rarau mai Living city, an immersive exhibition exploring the city of Auckland through the use of data. The installation was designed by Auckland War Memorial and OOM Creative and includes contributions from Dr. Michael Dunbar, my Masters supervisor. I was approached by OOM Creative to design Māori pixel font families for use in the LED data display, a dynamic text-based visualisation. Drawing on expertise with diacritics which I developed through my Masters research project designing Vietnamese typefaces, two pixel fonts were extended to crisply display Te Reo Māori.
Her Design Stories (Interview)
2020
'Her Design Stories', created by Trần Phương Thảo Ngọc, is a design project that aims to support and empower female designers in Vietnam.
Up? Down? Left? Right?
2019
In 2019, I completed my master’s degree at RMIT University with the research called Up? Down? Left? Right?, on the process of designing Vietnamese diacritics. During this research, I drew Mighty Mono, a geometric monospaced font and Untitled Display, a reverse-contrast display font.
