In Cơm nhà xứ Quảng (Home-cooked meals of the Quang region), Lưu Bình, born and raised in Quảng Nam, invites readers on a culinary journey to her hometown. Through her beautiful writing, she shares her childhood memories filled with joy, love, and mouth-watering dishes. Reading her essays gives me nostalgia for my own homeland. As a result, I decided to select 15 out of 86 pieces to create a Vietnamese typographic sample. The page is typeset in Lavishe, designed by Dương Trần, a Vietnamese type designer. Take a look at Cơm nhà xứ Quảng.

Last week, I spent some time cleaning up the Scalia Law Sites, a network of web presence for the law community powered by WordPress Multisite. As Director of Design & Web Services at Scalia Law School, I proposed, architected, designed, developed, and maintained this network, in addition to the main law school website.

The SLS network has over 50 sites, ranging from centers to clinics, faculty members to student organizations, intranets to special projects. As I went through the platform to clean up plugins and themes to comply with the University new branding, I realized that we didn’t have a site for our Design & Web Services team.

Our small team is responsible for not only the main law school website, but also the websites of our community. We provide digital solutions to meet the needs of departments, offices, centers, student organizations, faculty, and administrations. We make accessibility our top priorities. We have experienced accessibility specialists on our team to make Scalia Law’s digital information as accessible as possible. Furthermore, we collaborate closely with the Mason Digital Accessibility and Assistive Technology team on more complex accessibility issues.

We have over 25 years of experience in creating human-centered design. We care deeply about the codes as well as the user interfaces. We focus on providing digital experiences that are optimized, accessible, and usable. Furthermore, we collaborate with The Mason Information Technology team on the server side.

The Design & Web Services team also maintains and updates our Web Resources blog, which serves a collection of documentations, guidelines, and best practices for web design and development at Scalia Law School. As Director of Design & Web Services, I am proud of the work we are doing, which is powering Scalia Law’s web presence through human-centered design and accessibility. Take a look at the Design & Web Services site.

Mirinda Burst, designed by Naipe Foundry, is a fresh and playful typeface with Vietnamese support. In most cases, I don’t recommend thin diacritical marks on thick, bold letters, but the contrast works so darn well for Burst that I had to make the exception. I am glad that Azza pushed Burst into that direction and allowed me to review it. Thanks to the Naipe Foundry team for letting me play a small role in this fun, lively display typeface. Check out Mirinda Burst.

My portfolio website gets a typographic update. The large headings are still set in NaN Holo Compressed, designed by Luke Prowse with Jean-Baptiste Morizot and Fátima Lázaro. The UI elements are still set in NaN Holo Mono.

The body text, however, has been switched from NaN Holo Mono to Herbik, designed by Daniel Veneklaas. Setting body text in monospace was a departure for me. It was different, but brutalist was not my style. I wanted to get back to a serif text face. I licensed Herbik, designed by Daniel Veneklaas, a while ago and only used it to showcase Vietnamese diacritics. Now I get to use it on my own site.

I also cleaned up the projects a bit. I have been designing websites for more than 25 years; therefore, I have plenty of projects. My portfolio site is no longer needed to attract employers. It is now an archive of my work. Nethertheless, I trimmed down the number of projects.

I still love making websites and I still prefer coding by hands over using frameworks or IAs. I still want the exact HTML elements and CSS properties I put in. I don’t want extra codes from frameworks or extra crap generated by AIs.

In any rate, I am enjoying the combination of large compressed headlines, clear monospace UI elements, and easy-to-read copy. Check out donnytruong.com.

The Covid + Climate website officially launched on April 1, 2021. Around February 2024, only three years later, the website went off line. All the hard works of researching, writing, and drawing were gone. I was hoping that the site would come back online, but I lost faith after two years.

On April 30, 2026, I decided to register a domain name and put the site back online. Being part of the Covid + Climate project meant so much to me. Even though the Covid + Climate issue was serious, I had so much fun collaborating with artists and activists when I was tapped to design the website. I wanted to save the project.

Before bringing the site back online, I cleaned up design and made some minor changes to the original site. Check out the good old site at the new domain: covidclimate.org.

To learn more about the project, read the case study at my portfolio site.

In the last few years, Ðạo Trương, my oldest son, has immersed in digital arts and photography. He experiments with Blender to create 3D arts. He also takes his camera with him everywhere he goes. Even when skiing, he holds his camera instead of his ski poles. When not playing video games with his friends, Ðạo enjoys writing science fiction.

For his seventeenth birthday, I gifted him a website to showcase his arts, photos, and writings. I asked him to select his best works and put together a simple website for him. For typesetting, he prefers a serif type family. I selected Roslindale, designed by David Jonathan Ross. To make his arts and photos stand out, I chose a dark gray background. For the visual showcases, all images displayed on one page. To keep the viewing experience simple, no fancy sliders, special effects, or moving transitions were added. Visitors can take their time and view the artworks at their own pleasure.

In addition to his visual works, I wanted him to showcase a few of his creative writings. He has written many stories, but they are scattered all over the place. I hope he will pull them together into a collection or a book one day. For now, I only linked to a few pieces he posted on his blog.

Ðạo will be a senior next year. He will be busy finishing up his high school and applying for colleges. He won’t have the time to devote to his passion projects. Nevertheless, it is still nice to have his own website. I hope he enjoys this special gift from me.

Visit daotruong.com

Bảo Ninh is known for his historical fiction on the Việt Nam War. His works have been translated into 20 languages, including English. After reading his compelling short stories, I decided to create a typographic sample page featuring “Hà Nội at Midnight” and “Untamed Winds.” These two stories provide a glimpse into Bảo Ninh’s observations of the war. I also included English translations from Quân Mạnh Hà and Cab Trần. The sample is typeset in Atlante, designed by Yorlmar Campos & Martín Sesto.

In “99 Problems,” Jay-Z blasts, “Fuck critics, you can kiss my whole asshole! / If you don’t like my lyrics, you can press fast forward.” Nevertheless, Jay cares what critics write about his work. After reading Elizabeth Méndez Berry’s scathing review of Reasonable Doubt; Vol. 3 … Life & Times of S. Carter; The Blueprint, Jay called her and said “You write like I rap.” Motivated by her criticism, Jay rewrote “P.S.A.” for The Black Album, in which he claimed, “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on / I’m complex / I never claimed to have wings on.”

Having read Ms. Méndez Berry’s essay on Jay from Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide, edited by Oliver Wang, I appreciated the art of music criticism. I read as many reviews I could get my hands on. I also started to write my own music reviews on my blog as a way to hone my writing skills.

For me, hip-hop has always been about lyrics, and yet I was not impressed with Jay’s materialistic, misogynistic rhymes. I enjoyed Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life, but I couldn’t get past his doses of braggadocio in records such as “Can I Get A…,” “Money, Cash, Hoes,” and “Money Ain’t a Thang.” It took The Black Album, his statement on retirement, for me to pay attention to his lyrics. In the outro of “December 4^th,” he said, “If you can’t respect that, your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you’ll love me when I fade to black.” He was right. The Black Album showcases Jay’s articulate storytelling, witty wordplays, sharp punchlines, and poetic prose. In his book, Jay-Z: Made in America, Professor Michael Eric Dyson describes Jay-Z as “Robert Frost with a Brooklyn Accent, Rita Dove with a Jesus piece.”

After listening to The Black Album on repeat for months, I went back to The Blueprint, Reasonable Doubt, and the rest of his catalog. Reading his lyrics in between the lines, I discovered so many hidden gems that I created a webpage, “Beacon of Hov,” to highlight my favorite quotes.

For this particular project, I would like to put together a collection of essays that were critical of Jay-Z’s music. I called the project: “Hovacritical.” These essays were written by critics and authors I respect: Greg Tate, Elizabeth Méndez Berry, Kelefa Sanneh, Sasha Frere-Jones, Hua Hsu, Zadie Smith, Michael Eric Dyson, and Yannick Giovanni Marshall. They were pulled from various print and online sources. While I enjoyed the content, I found the reading experience, especially online platforms with moving, pop-in ads obscuring the text, to be distracting and unpleasant.

These well-written essays deserve a better reading experience; therefore, I decided to create a space for them. My focus was on typography. For the main text, I chose Turnip, designed by David Jonathan Ross. For big headings, I selected Nickel Gothic, also designed by Ross. For small texts, I went with Forma DJR, also designed by Ross. While I prefer reading black text on white background, I also provide a dark theme if you prefer the reverse.

This project is created for my own reading pleasure, but you are more than welcome to check out Hovacritical.

Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s những tin tức về một ngôi làng (chronicles of a village) is a historical fiction based on a nameless village and told through a nameless scribe. The entire novel is written in lowercase letters and without any periods to give an oral tradition of storytelling. The series of story are fragmented mixing mythology with history. I selected a few chapters to introduce this fascinating work of literary. I included Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s original Vietnamese text as well as Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s outstanding English translation. The sample is typeset in Newsreader, designed by Hugues Gentile and Jean-Baptiste Levée. Check out the Vietnamese-English typographic sample page.

Allow me to reintroduce my blog. The 2026 redesign of Visualgui.com has launched. As usual, I would like to give my blog a new look at least once a year around December. In these last few years, however, skiing and snowboarding had taken up my time. Furthermore, I became attached to the 2025 rendition. Nevertheless, I needed to make a change. I have to keep my site fresh and I have to keep up my web design and development games.

One of the nice things about working on my own project is that I have no expectations. I could make any changes I wanted, though I rarely moved away from legibility and readability. It’s a blog; therefore, text has to be the primary focus and I always love using new typefaces.

The Visualgui 2026 redesign is inspired by Dương Trần, a young, promising type designer living and making fonts in Hà Nội, Việt Nam. I got to know him from FutureFonts, where I licensed his fonts. He recently updated Lavishe, an elegant serif face. Even though Lavishe is still a work in progress, it has enough weights and matching italics to be used on a production site. Lavishe has not only beautiful characters, but also lovely diacritical marks. I have to use it on my site.

In searching for a pairing for Lavishe, I returned to FutureFonts and found Siryous, Trần’s work-in-progress monospaced sans-serif. I licensed it. Even though Siryous isn’t fully developed, it has enough glyphs for what I need for my blog. I can’t wait for future updates of this typeface.

For the blog layout, I wanted to return to the grid system. I even brought back the sidebar to give the vibe of a blog. No, blog is not dead yet—at least not for me. After 23 years, I still love blogging.

I experimented with different colors. I almost settled on a fresh green, but I pulled back to black and white. I just love how Lavishe is read on a crisp, clean, white background. I also offered the dark mode for those who like to read white text on black background. I don’t have a switch button. It goes along with your preference setting.

I applied CSS grid and fluid layout to take up the entire browser. I put a limit on the width of paragraph text to keep readability, but the layout has no maximum width. I opened up the design and bumped up the text size. Yes, I am getting old and I need the text to be large enough to read.

The redesign of Visualgui 2026 doesn’t break any new ground, but for the first time my blog is set in typefaces designed by a Vietnamese type designer. For someone who has been promoting the enrichment and expansion of “Vietnamese Typography,” I can’t ask for more. Keep up the excellent work, Dương Trần.