A decade ago on this day—November 12, 2015—I launched Vietnamese Typography, my final thesis for graduate school as well as my personal ambition: to enhance and enrich typography in Vietnamese. From working with type designers around the world and seeing more and more typefaces with Vietnamese diacritics, I have achieved my goal.
What I didn’t expect, however, was that Vietnamese Typography had reached my own Vietnamese design community. Since the launch of the book, I had heard from young Vietnamese designers who thanked me for making this book available online. Because of Vietnamese Typography, Vietnamese designers started to pay attention to the art of typography. Many young talented designers had turned to type design as their professional careers and my book had inspired them. Those words were beyond what I could have imagined even in my wildest dream. Vietnamese Typography has come full circle.
Over the past ten years, I am grateful to the type community around the world for embracing Vietnamese Typography and making typefaces that support Vietnamese readers. Every time I visited a type specimen website, I couldn’t help cracking a smile when I read: “This typeface supports over 400 languages, including Vietnamese.” I just loved how Vietnamese was being called out.
It has been a great 10-year run. The traffic to this website is still high. I still update my list of type recommendations. I still enjoy crafting sample projects when I find something intriguing in Vietnamese culture and literature. I will keep this site up and running for as long as I can. Thank you for all of your support.