Support Vietnamese Typography

Haven’t blogged in the last several days because I have been focusing on the second edition of Vietnamese Typography. I have thought about this project for a while. Should I leave the book as it or revise it? Doing a major update will require a chunk of my time to devote to the project. I tempted to leave the website as it, but I know I can make it better. I have lots of ideas on how to improve it. I love to be able to just work on it, but I have a family with three young boys and another one coming soon. As a result, my time is limited.

I love this project even though it does not make me any money. It brought me some consultant gigs, but they aren’t much either. My real joy is seeing new typefaces with Vietnamese. From my interaction with designers and what I have found online, this book has been useful. I came across several mentions of the book.

James Puckett writes for I Love Typography:

I also added support for Vietnamese, using Donny Trương’s book Vietnamese Typography as my guide. Vietnamese uses stacked diacritical marks on some vowels, so I had to carefully balance the weight of each mark to work in single mark letters and Vietnamese…. Designing the Vietnamese marks improved my skills designing marks, making this the best collection of diacritical marks I’ve ever produced.

Florian Hardwig writes for Font In Use:

For those interested in proper Vietnamese typography, Donny Trương provides a good introduction, including an overview of the letters with diacritics that are actually used for marking tonal distinctions in this language.

TypeTogether writes about the extension of Adelle Sans:

A good starting point to better understand the history and the typographic challenges of Vietnamese is Donny Trương’s online book Vietnamese Typography.

Tyrus tweets:

I stumbled into this really interesting and informative site about Vietnamese typography while researching localization and character support for a project. So well done, I wish there was a guide like this for all languages and character sets.

If you find this book is useful, please consider supporting my efforts to make it an even better resource for the type community. You can contribute $10, $5, or $1. Any amount will help.