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Phudu

Designed by Dương Trần

About

Phudu is a sans-serif display typeface inspired by Vietnamese hand-lettering billboards in the old days, that supports a wide range of languages by Duong Tran. As a new way to achieve variable font, the lighterPhudu gets, the extended it becomes, for people to read it easier compared to other lightweight narrow typefaces.

In the progress of learning and crafting types, Duong has always thought about what makes a Vietnamese typeface. If we rewind to the past, we can see a Vietnamese lettering style on the billboard stores, when the artists adapted Latin typefaces and then added marks based on their styles. Among those, there were mostly all-caps sans-serif types played as descriptions or the store's names themself. To make a new easy-to-read and easy-to-get typeface, Duong mixed some of the researched letters from the story above. He doesn't want to just revive the types, he wants to improve them to fit the modern-day styles, but still have "Vietnamese" souls in them. The typeface was named Phudu (phục dựng) - "revival" in Vietnamese, and has a meaning of timeless (quite the opposite of the name when it can be read as "phù du" - ephemeral).

To contribute, see github.com/duongtrtype/DTPhudu

Designer

Dương Trần is a Vietnamese graphic designer and type practitioner, who shares passions in creating visual identities, layout designs and typography. From 2020, he has been crafting letters with emotional expressions and focuses on how to scale up the market of Vietnamese supported typefaces, starting with Phudu and Loes.

Website | Instagram

Choosing type

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices. By setting some useful constraints to aid our type selection, we can also develop a critical eye for analyzing type along the way.

Phudu - Google Fonts