Typography

Story

Before French colonization, Vietnam used Nôm (𡨸喃)—a logographic writing system using Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and native Vietnamese words. This is the equivalent of Korean Hanja and Japanese Kanji. It was not until the 17th century that the Vietnamese language was recorded in the Latin script that eventually became the current official writing system of the country. Considering the relatively young relationship between the Vietnamese culture and its writing system (compared to that of the Western countries), the visual understanding of the alphabet was mainly focused on the art of calligraphy. It was not until my early college education that typography became not only about beautiful stokes on a page but a means of emotional expression. When we think about typography, what most people think of is how they can read letters and words. However, I have a different perspective. I often ask: How can we create an experience where the writing system can be perceived visually to tell a story?

The aha moment

Types that can be read not only visually but emotionally.

Approach

The most important thing is always the story. What are we trying to tell? What emotions are we trying to evoke, or to preserve? The most common way to read in the Western world is from left to right, and top to bottom. This common practice presents an exciting challenge to designers: How one can imbue emotions into a rigid structure of lines and text blocks? While letters are defined shapes, emotions are raw. Hence, we have to find an appropriate typographic expression to deliver the emotional rawness. It could be the placement of types in the Hinge poem, the falling movement in Weekend, or even a full type invention from already known objects in Call Me by Your Name. The voice in your head when you read a sentence matters, but the visual expression of that sentence is what gives that voice substance to draw you into the story.