The Past is the Future
Texts collected by Lưu Chữ’, an independent Vietnamese typography collective which archives and researches the country’s graphic design history (image: Lưu Chữ’).
In a recent New York Times article, ‘Read Your Way Through Hanoi’ (2023) by novelist Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, readers may have clocked an intriguing footnote, one that had never before appeared in the publication’s 172-year history. In the footnote, Nguyễn noted: “The Vietnamese words in the original version of this essay used diacritical marks. To comply with New York Times style, the marks were removed before publication.”
Nguyễn went on to explain how “this practice alters the meaning of the words” – by not representing Vietnamese words as they should be written, The New York Times is systematically allowing incorrect spelling, and creating factual errors. “In the case of Hỏa Lò Prison, for example, ‘hỏa’ means ‘fire,’ and ‘lò’ means ‘furnace’: the Burning Furnace Prison. Without the marks, ‘hoa’ means ‘flowers,’ and ‘lo’ means ‘worry,’ rendering the term ‘oa o’ meaningless,” wrote Nguyễn.
It was bold of the novelist to question the editorial standards of the long-standing publication. However, permitting such a footnote is perhaps a sign of progress. By naming the problem, there is an opportunity to address it. Nguyễn’s footnote concludes with a call to action: “I look forward to the day when The Times and other Western publications celebrate the richness and complexity of Vietnamese, and of all other languages, by showcasing them in their original formats.”
Examples of diacritical details from the Vietnamese Typography ebook (image: Donny Trương).
As a writer who regularly includes Vietnamese words in English-language articles and publications, I have also faced the problem of diacritics. When writing for The Guardian in 2021 about the rediscovery of 60s singer Phương Tâm, I was regretfully informed by my editor they could not accommodate diacritics because “it looks uneven when printed”.[1] It was a problem of styling, rather than technical impossibility. A few diacritics did eventually make it into the article – like â, found in a number of languages – but having a few letters with diacritics does not make those words correct. The fundamental problem stands: the Vietnamese language is still not considered important enough to be represented the way it should be.
In response to Nguyễn’s New York Times footnote, designer Donny Trương, who is based in Arlington, Virginia, reformatted her article to show it is possible to include the full set of Vietnamese diacritics. To achieve this, he used the typefaces Kaius, Job Clarendon and Change, designed respectively by Lisa Fischbach, David Jonathan Ross and Bethany Heck, and Alessio Leonardi. The reformatted version of Nguyễn’s piece is published in Trương’s ebook Vietnamese Typography (2015), which is free to read and regularly updated, and features an ever-growing ‘Samples’ section. Nguyễn’s article now looks and reads as it should.
Image: Donny Trương.
Vietnamese Typography was originally written as Trương’s Master’s thesis at George Mason University School of the Arts, and born out of the frustration he felt about the lack of Vietnamese diacritics in modern typefaces. It has since become an invaluable resource, particularly for non-Vietnamese type designers interested in designing typefaces that support Vietnamese, which has the most diacritics of any language with Romanised script. These diacritics are not just marks above one letter, as is the case with common diacritics in European languages (e.g. é, à, ö); in Vietnamese, the complexity is due to the way in which diacritics are also stacked on top of each other (e.g. ổ, ề). There is also the diacritic that appears below letters, as you can see in my name, and with letters that have existing diacritics (e.g. ậ, ệ). In his book, Trương outlines some of the design challenges this presents: “The marks must be consistent in the entire font system to create uninterrupted flow of text. The strokes of the marks have to work well with the base letters to help readers determine the meaning of words. They must not get in the way of the base letter and collide with adjacent letters. Considering balance, harmony, space, position, placement, contrast, size, and weight, designers must overcome each challenge to create a successful typeface for Vietnamese.”
Thinking back to my 2021 Guardian article, I began to investigate further. The newspaper’s current typeface, Guardian Headline was launched in 2018 and designed by award-winning New York- and London-based type foundry Commercial Type. I wrote to the foundry to ask about the lack of support for Vietnamese diacritics. “Requests to add Vietnamese support come up from time to time,” wrote back Christian Schwartz, a partner at Commercial Type. “But customers have rarely budgeted for the extra time and expense.” Schwartz’s comments gave me pause. Even though we live in a world that is more globalised and interconnected than ever, it is concerning that major media outlets are still not investing in typefaces that ensure more accurate reporting.
Image: Lưu Chữ’.
In these examples, we can see that Vietnamese diacritics represent a design and language problem that many of us in the diaspora recognise, all over the world – I live in Australia, Trương is in the United States, and Nguyễn lives in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. But we’re not the only ones. The story of Vietnamese typography predates us all, and begins in the place where our mother tongue originates.[2]
For centuries, Vietnamese was written using Chinese characters, a result of China’s millennium-long rule of the region. Although Chinese rule ended in 938 AD, Vietnamese continued to be written only in Chinese characters until the 17th century. In 1624, a French Jesuit named Alexandre de Rhodes came to what was then known as “Cochinchina” – southern Vietnam. He is widely credited with inventing the Romanised version of Vietnamese script. Rhodes, however, was not the first to Romanise Vietnamese, as explained in the excellent historical overview in Vietnamese Typography. His work built on the work of Portuguese missionaries such as Gaspar do Amaral, António Barbosa and Francisco de Pina – the latter is considered the first European to speak fluent Vietnamese – but it is Rhodes who created what is known as “Quốc ngữ”, which has since evolved to become the official writing system for Vietnamese. Although he is a distant historical figure, he was someone I heard about while growing up in an expatriate community in the 80s and 90s. On our family altar, my father even has a small black and white picture of him. Rhodes is remembered because he helped to make literacy widespread in Vietnam, whereas the Chinese-based versions of the written language had been largely inaccessible outside elite circles.
Cadao, the first modern and original typeface designed specifically for Vietnamese (image: Phạm Đam Ca).
Although the origins of Quốc ngữ began with European missionaries, and it became the official writing system under French colonial rule (1864-1954), it was its uptake by the Vietnamese themselves and the tweaks they made that has brought us to where we are now – with designers working to get the importance of Vietnamese typography more widely recognised. The evolution of the Vietnamese written language from many influences brings to mind other aspects of Vietnam’s culture, which absorbs outside influences and indigenises them – food, art, architecture, music. These are the thoughts I kept returning to with every designer I spoke to about Vietnamese typography, and how the designs of the world’s past are becoming part of the designs of Vietnam’s future.
The first modern and original typeface designed specifically for Vietnamese was Cadao by Phạm Đam Ca, a graphic and type designer, and former professor at Hanoi Architectural University. Cadao was released in 2012 after two years of development while Phạm studied at ESAD Amiens in France. As Phạm has written, “[Cadao] is, in my opinion, the first typeface family which is seriously designed for the Vietnamese language requirements. All other existing fonts for use in Vietnamese were simply solutions to adaptation needs.” At the end of 2013, he began to develop an updated version of the typeface focusing on further enhancing the diacritical system. Cadao has since been used for literary publications, among other purposes.
“It surprised me to learn that the first original typeface for Vietnamese was designed only in 2012, just over a decade ago.”
It surprised me to learn that the first original typeface for Vietnamese was designed only in 2012, just over a decade ago. My first reaction was that surely one major factor is the civil war, which ended in 1975. After all, the long period of turbulence that followed temporarily halted the evolution of design and fashion, which had otherwise been flourishing – particularly in South Vietnam. A mass exodus also led to valuable resources and talent flowing out of the country. While postwar Vietnam was focused on recovering, elsewhere, in more stable and prosperous parts of the world, old typefaces were becoming digitised in the 80s and 90s, alongside new ones being specifically created for a digital medium. That’s not to say that the pre-digital past is irrelevant in the story of Vietnamese typography, however – far from it.
The past informs collective Lưu Chữ’s thinking about the future. Lưu Chữ (Archiving Type) describes itself as “an independent Vietnamese Typography Collective” and is based in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Its members have been archiving and researching Vietnamese graphic design history since 2015. “We started searching, finding documents and old books,” says Lê Quốc Huy, the graphic designer who founded the collective. “I was curious and wanted to understand,” he adds, explaining to me in Vietnamese the origins of his thinking behind the collective’s formation: realising that various aspects of Vietnam’s immediate past, from the time before he was born in the early 1990s, weren’t being formally taught.
Hand-painted signs in Vietnam (image: Lưu Chữ’).
Paying attention to old artefacts made past practices and the history of Vietnamese design start to emerge. But it was documenting and studying the wonderful lettering on local shopfronts’ old signage that really brought the project to life. “The sign writers and the families knew the story behind these signs, how they were created,” says Lê. “These stories made it easier to understand, connecting with what we saw in books too.”
Lưu Chữ documents examples of street signage through the hashtag #thelosttypevietnam on Instagram. The snapshots are taken by the collective and their extended network, with photos of prints, media and street signage throughout the country. Scrolling through the tagged images, you see not only an archive of typefaces and signage, but other ubiquitous elements of Vietnamese design and architecture. On many of the images of shop signs, for example, the vernacular ironwork that is found on windows and doors throughout the country is also captured. These metal designs have become iconic – another example of a European introduction that has become intrinsic to the everyday language of Vietnamese buildings.
“The output of this project is created by and for Vietnamese people. This is our effort to return the unique but familiar aesthetics of local identity to the community.”
On the same call with Lê is Cao Xuân Đức, another HCMC-based designer who joined the collective in 2020. He explains to me in English how the initial collecting morphed into an online archive and series of articles documenting their investigations. This includes excerpts from the books they’ve collected, with more than 200 titles in their library, which they are in the process of making publicly accessible this year through a new space in the city. Lately, Lưu Chữ has been embarking on typeface design. “We’re in the process of reviving a typeface that was often found in propaganda materials,” says Cao. “We are in the process of digitising it and making it public; that’s the goal for the future.”
In a similar vein, Giang Nguyễn, a designer and university lecturer at RMIT Vietnam, launched the community project Republish in 2020. Operating through his design practice, Behalf Studio, the explicit aim of Republish is to produce a curated collection of free and open-source fonts under SIL Open Font Licences. These typefaces are also available through Adobe Fonts; so far they have released five. As the Republish website states: “The output of this project is[…] created by and for Vietnamese people. This is our effort to return the unique but familiar aesthetics of local identity to the community.”
Concrete typography on the gates of Saigon’s Bến Thành market (image: Republish).
Republish’s fonts find their inspiration from historic references. The elegant Westgate (Cửa Tây), for example, designed by Nguyễn as Republish’s first font, is based on the vernacular concrete typography found on the north, west and east gates of Saigon’s iconic market, Ben Thanh (Bến Thành). It alludes to the art deco style of the French colonial era in the early 20th century. Instead of being a liability, the diacritics are a design highlight. Other typefaces have since been added to the platform, based on old signage and songbooks. The development of each is based on a rigorous assessment process; after all, there is no shortage of inspiration on the streets of Vietnam, as Lưu Chữ has documented. But there are challenges in adapting lettering from signage for digital use.
“One of the common issues is that the nuances look very nice on sheet music and metal signage done by hand, but when you digitise them, they look quite awkward because we expect vectorised strokes to be perfect,” says Nguyễn, speaking to me in English from his studio in HCMC. “Most of the lettering artists who did beautiful sheet music letterings and sign paintings were painters, illustrators. So it’s craft-based rather than metal type-based.” But when they can incorporate old elements into digital typefaces, I believe that the result can help to create a sense of continuity for a culture that has experienced constant disruption over the past century. The typeface Đanh Đá was created by Nguyễn in collaboration with Chicago- based artist Hương Ngô, for their art project “To Name It Is To See It”. It is now one of Republish’s offerings. Đanh Đá is based on A typeface from Phụ nữ Tân Tiến, a women’s magazine published in Huế in 1932. As Republish describes it, “Đanh Đá is a bold and condensed sans-serif that carries traces of art deco influences from French colonial era with the subtle hardness and boldness of propaganda style.”
The Westgate font, made by Behalf Studio for Republish, was inspired by Bến Thành market’s typography (image: Republish).
Another designer I spoke to is Thy Hà, based in Melbourne, Australia. By day she is a UX/UI designer and Webflow developer, and by night she is a type designer. She is also a member of Lưu Chữ, coming on board in 2020, as well as a former student of Nguyễn when she studied in Vietnam. “I really want to do more type design, but it’s not a big industry,” she tells me, once again highlighting the financial reality for Vietnamese type designers, who face many barriers. All of this work is a labour of love; Lưu Chữ currently receives no funding and Republish is primarily subsidised by the work of Behalf Studio, with additional support from grants and contributions.
During my conversation with Hà, she points out that in Vietnam, Cooper Black is pervasive in contemporary signage. Originally designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry in 1922, an adapted version of the typeface titled VNI-Cooper was created to support Vietnamese, and has long been distributed for free. There’s a reason for this: VNI-Cooper was developed by VNI Software Company, founded by the late Hồ Thành Việt. Hồ served in the South Vietnamese army and came to the United States in 1975 as a resettled refugee. He deserves a place in the story of Vietnamese typography because, although he was an electrical engineer and not a typeface designer, he was responsible for bringing Vietnamese letterforms to computers with the VNI character set. Even as Vietnam experienced a delay with its entry into digital typefaces, the bridging work of Hồ in adapting an existing typeface ensured that, in the 80s and 90s, Vietnamese could be represented digitally and on the burgeoning World Wide Web. His invaluable work laid the foundation for all the type designers to come. (In Vietnam, during the 90s, other engineers – particularly from the North – adapted other typefaces to achieve similar results.)
Thy Hà’s Eyja font supports Vietnamese and close to 400 other languages (image: Thy Hà).
Now that Hà lives in Australia, she, too, sees herself as a “bridge” between where she grew up and her adopted home. She notes that most of her type designer friends are from Australia and the United States. “I have an advantage here to learn from different type designers, but also connect it back to Vietnam.” It was after migrating to Australia, after all, that she developed her first typeface as her Master’s project under the guidance of accomplished type designer Vincent Chan, a lecturer at RMIT in Melbourne. Mighty Mono was released last year and fully supports Vietnamese; it is available through type foundry Modern Type. Her latest typeface Eyja, also released in 2023, is based on a serif typeface she found in an 1852 edition of Visit to Iceland and The Scandinavian North by Ida Pfeiffer. Hà writes of its provenance: “I discovered the book through a book collector on Facebook Marketplace during the Melbourne lockdown, when all the antique book shops were closed.”
Eyja demonstrates the possibilities that come with migration and seemingly incongruous design worlds meeting, and how a typeface inspired by Scandinavian design supports Vietnamese and close to 400 other languages. The way it is distributed is also worth discussing in terms of how more inclusive design can be achieved. Hà licences Eyja through Counter Forms, a pioneering new foundry and platform that aims to give typography “a more accessible, diverse and equitable future.” The platform was co-founded by Hà’s former university lecturer Vincent Chan, alongside Dominic Hofstede and Robert Janes. Chan believes that the problem of Vietnamese typography is not merely one of design, but requires fundamentally shifting the graphic design field to become more inclusive. “Counter Forms’ base character set includes Vietnamese, but also diacritics to cover Indigenous languages in this country,” he says. “Notions of ‘standardised’ character sets[…] are inherently political decisions.”
Image: Thy Hà.
Guided by equity, Counter Forms also offers pricing based on the location of the licensee. “I think in many ways it’s about who we are deciding to include and exclude, and where we draw that line,” explains Chan. Counter Forms’ relative pricing is not common practice for the vast majority of foundries, which generally sell their typefaces for a high fixed price. Chan also feels that designers could be doing more to educate their clients about the possibilities of representing languages. “I think it’s largely on designers to put forward these notions of support and accessibility,” he says. “From a business perspective you can talk about its reach.” Expanding the market in general is certainly one way to reposition this design problem: is it better to have fewer people use your typeface because of how expensive it is, or is it better for as many people as possible to use it the world over?
Counter Forms, then, joins a movement of type designers and foundries considering their work as being as much a social and political act as a market- driven or aesthetic pursuit. Given how things are evolving, perhaps it won’t be long before Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and myself will be able to include Vietnamese diacritics in our writing for global publications like The New York Times and The Guardian. There already exists, after all, Vietnamese Typography, a freely available ebook, which has directly led to typefaces being redesigned to support Vietnamese. Then there are the designers in Vietnam drawing inspiration from history and elsewhere to create typefaces that allow Vietnamese people greater access to aesthetic choices as expressed through typography. And then there are the designers, both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, working to change the field of commercial typography to be more inclusive. It’s a hopeful time and exciting to see the countervailing design forces at work in Vietnam and abroad which continue to challenge the status quo – one typeface at a time.
[1] When this essay first appeared in Disegno #37, we discovered that the two fonts we use for our print journal do not support Vietnamese diacritics. In order to publish the essay accurately, the text was interspersed with examples of Barber (Thợ Cạo) by Behalf Studio for Republish. The fonts on our website cater for the full set of diacritics, so the online version was published without using any additional fonts.
[2] Before I get to Vietnam, I want to include a brief note about names. In Vietnamese, as in many languages, one’s family name appears first. So , for example, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s family name is Nguyễn – the same surname as at least a third of Vietnamese people. Given that there are relatively few surnames for a population of 90 million-odd people, I have long felt awkward referring to Vietnamese people by their surnames as is the convention in English-language articles. In addition, those of us in the diaspora living in the anglophone world largely adopt the typical naming structure of our family names being last. This is especially the case when you have an English name, like I do. I’m Sheila Ngọc Phạm, rather than Phạm Ngọc Sheila, because the latter just doesn’t sound right. This is just to say that the issue of names adds another layer of complexity and a challenge that arises in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Place names are often written without diacritics and are regularised in English: Saigon instead of Sài Gòn, Vietnam instead of Việt Nam. While compromising on common place names is not necessarily a major inaccuracy, this is not true of many other words that include diacritics.
Words Sheila Ngọc Phạm