Designing Vietnamese Support for Dupioni

Over the last six months, I’ve traveled to Vietnam twice. The first trip was a solo trip focused on yoga and work. As a type designer, I naturally pay attention to typography everywhere I go. It can honestly be a little annoying sometimes. Why can’t I just read a menu without analyzing the font first?

But in Vietnam, something immediately caught my attention. Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, but combined with all these accents, hooks, dots, and marks I hadn’t really looked closely at before. I felt an immediate need to understand it better.

On my second trip, I returned for a wedding I unexpectedly got invited to as a spouse. The trip was completely different, and I probably drove my travel companions slightly crazy by stopping at every other sign or storefront to look at the typography. Then, on a boat in Ha Long Bay the day before the wedding, I opened Glyphs and started designing. My camera roll was already full of reference photos from street signs, menus, packaging, and storefronts.

At first, Vietnamese typography looked endless to me. An overwhelming amount of symbols and combinations. But once I started working on it, I realized it’s actually not that many individual marks. It’s just a beautifully complex system of combinations. The hook accent quickly became one of my favorites, along with the horn used on the Ơ/ơ and Ư/ư.

Some letters were definitely more challenging than others. There’s only so much space to work with, and fitting two accents onto one letter while keeping everything balanced can be difficult. But it’s also incredibly rewarding when it finally clicks.

While looking at typography around Vietnam, one thing became very obvious to me. Some typefaces treated the Vietnamese characters as a natural part of the design system, while others felt like the accents had simply been added afterward as an afterthought.

That became very important to me while working on Dupioni.

I didn’t want the accents to feel separate from the typeface. I wanted them to feel fully integrated into the overall rhythm and personality of the design. Not something added at the end just to technically support the language.

Now I’m slightly obsessed with these letters. Vietnamese support will be included in all of my future typefaces, and I’m currently adding it to some of my existing families as well, including Ponte and Silk Serif. And honestly, I think the typefaces are becoming better because of it.