Type Design
“Thy can talk about fonts all day!”
Thy doesn’t just talk about type — she spends a lot of time drawing fonts too. As a native Vietnamese speaker, she often collaborates with type designers and foundries to develop typefaces with Vietnamese language support, through her own type practice, Mai Type. Recognising that type design is still largely shaped by Western perspectives, her work aims to bridge the gap between markets and bring greater cultural nuance to the field.
In her spare time, she enjoys discussing type-related matters with the collectives Lưu Chữ and Counter Forms.
Typefaces
Eyja
Eyja is a revival project from Type@Cooper program in 2021. It is based on a serif typeface found in an 1852 edition of "Visit to Iceland and The Scandinavian North" by Ida Pfeiffer.
Released with
Counter Forms
Available in Regular
MT Mighty Mono
Mighty Mono is a low-contrast, geometric monospaced typeface. It is an interpretation with the letterforms that Thy has been familiar with since primary school in Vietnam, such as the ‘i’ with the little tail, or the single-storey ‘a’ and ‘g’.
Released with
Modern Type
Available in Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, and Bold
Mai Display
Mai Display (previously Untitled Display) is a reverse-contrast display sans inspired by the old hand-painted signages in Vietnam, which are well-known typography visual materials.
Featured work & achievements
ATypI Brisbane 2024 Speaker
Representing Lưu Chữ, her Vietnamese Typography Collective, Thy shared the group's journey in preserving Vietnamese Typography's cultural essence of Vietnamese typography amid modernisation, along with their research into its documented evolution.
Counter Forms Launch Panel
Counter Forms is a new typographic venture that champions young, discursive Antipodean type designers. Thy was honoured to contribute as a member of the collective and take part in the launch panel at the Melbourne Art Book Fair 2023.
Forward to the Past
In Further Reading Print No. 3, Thy contributed an essay titled "Forward to the Past", reflecting on Vietnamese typography and her journey into type design. Acknowledging that type design is still largely viewed as a Western-centric discipline, she hopes to help bridge the gap between markets in the future.
Typographic solution for Rarau mai Living city
Rarau mai Living City is an immersive exhibition delving into Auckland through data. Created by Auckland War Memorial and OOM Creative, with contributions from Michael Dunbar, Thy's Masters supervisor. OOM Creative enlisted Thy to design Māori pixel fonts for the LED data display, drawing from her expertise in diacritics developed during her Masters. Two pixel fonts were tailored to showcase Te Reo Māori with clarity and precision.
The Malee Scholarship 2021 Finalist
The Malee Scholarship is a scholarship fund initiated and funded by Sharp Type, to support and empower women of colour in type design field.
Her Design Stories (Interview)
'Her Design Stories', created by Trần Phương Thảo Ngọc, is a design project that aims to support and empower female designers in Vietnam.
Up? Down? Left? Right?
Master’s research project on the design of Vietnamese diacritics, completed in 2019 at RMIT University. The project aims to provide a reference framework for typographers, type designers, and graphic designers by examining the historical context and proper positioning of diacritics. It also includes the practical development of two typefaces: Mighty Mono and Untitled Display (now released as Mai Display).