If you’ve paid attention to shop signs and brand visuals across Vietnam’s cybersphere, you’ve probably come across one of Nguyễn Thế Mạnh's typefaces.
Mạnh is the creative mind behind Classique Saigon, a vintage set of fonts whose retro plumpness and modernist feel have dominated local coffee and bánh mì stands ever since its birth back in 2016. Since then, the graphic designer from Hanoi has released a number of typeface projects taking inspiration from local culture, such as Cotdien or Aodai.
Most recently, Mạnh unveiled his most ambitious collection of typefaces to date, Bolero, a set of six vintage font families that came to life right from the album covers and music sheets of past decades.
Bolero is perhaps Vietnam’s most favorite genre of music; its sentimental lyrics and easy-to-remember melodies have spawned a catholic library of songs with mass appeal. The designer was particularly fascinated with the genre’s covers, which were all hand-painted by artists like Duy Liêm, Kha Thùy Châu, and recently Lâm Nguyễn Kha Liêm.
The six typefaces are: Physica, Anarchia, Reducta, Epika, Rustra, and Selectra. “All of these six have customized Vietnamese diacritics that mimics the way they're originally drawn (small, thin, heavily emphasized in an unsual [sic] way that helps them stand out) and is specifically handcrafted for designs that need a retro, organic touch and scream Vietnamese like song titles and CD covers, digital posters and likewise,” Mạnh explains the design intention behind the project.
While each of the six is its own design, they all share some stylistic attributes common to the eras when the original covers were created, like flat, horizontal diacritics, bold brushstrokes, and blocky silhouettes.
Physica features perfect circles and neat sans serif graphemes, seeking to recreate “the craft of drawing and cutting letter with compasses and rulers.”
Rustra is the most “chaotic” of the six, as it aims to emulate the retro hand-writing on the famous music sheet of ‘Nỗi buồn hoa phượng,’ as seen in its 1966 release.
Anarchia, on the other hand, has solid spaces and sharp tips, evoking a funky feeling.
Selectra is a unicase sans serif family with empty counters for uppercase and filled counters for lowercase, recreating the signature motif occasionally used for hand-drawn song titles and covers.
Reducta is the most irregularly geometrical family, featuring quadrilateral strokes and asymmetrical graphemes, even for letters like A and V.
Epika has thin lines and slightly flared ends that, according to Mạnh, borrow from “the brushstrokes of letters drawn with technical pens.”
