Aodai Typeface

Aodai Typeface (Aodai - pronounced /ˈaʊ ˈdaɪ/ or /ou-dahy/, Vietnamese: Áo dài, the traditional and national dress usually worn by Vietnamese women) is a typeface created by Manh Nguyen, a designer based in Hanoi, Vietnam. In an effort of bringing back the oldstyle vibes of hand-painting retro panels, banners and covers books published by local publisher in the late 20th century, Nguyen decided to pay homage to the charming yet discreet oriental beauty of Viet women wearing the ao dai; the font’s characteristics have to be something not quite expressively sleazy but still embraces discreet and prudent sexiness of an Indochina woman. Nguyen chose to create a geometric, modern, unicase, display sans-serif with high contrast mimicking the fashionable Didone typestyle, with elegant ratios on delicate backbone system of the anatomy, alongside with one-of-a-kind punctuation and mixed diacritical mark system (two distinct diacritical mark systems for uppercase and lowercase glyphs), noted with some twisted differences between two cases of some letters (i.e uppercase and lowercase O, C, Q, G etc.). To conserve and accentuate the imperfection of hand painting, the highly condensed kerning is added while the font is created and tested, and kerning between some combos of glyphs, i.e VAV, is also edited in the polishing process.

Aodai Typeface is now on Creative Market with support to several languages (of course, including Vietnamese). If you found this project interesting, an Appreciation with the blue like button is highly recommended and don’t forget to follow the link at the end of this showcase to buy this feminine typeface to encourage my effort to bring made-in-Vietnam design out to the world.

Cheers, Manh Nguyen