About
I create websites by day and draw fonts by night.
Projects
Counter Forms is a platform that champions emerging, discursive, antipodean type designers. Driven by typographic research, education and advocacy, we publish original typefaces and texts towards a more accessible, diverse and equitable future.
Counter Forms was made on/across/between the stolen lands of many Sovereign people including on Wurundjeri and Whadjuk lands. We acknowledge and honour Ngati Whatua and Te Kawerau a Maki. We recognise that our practices are situated on unceded land and that colonisation continues today. We seek to wrestle, reckon and confront these ongoing injustices.
(words from Counter Forms)
Lưu Chữ is an independent Vietnamese typography collective. Together we research, archive and design typefaces.
My master's research project: Established an analytical framework in designing and positioning Vietnamese diacritics in the type design process through the process of making two fonts, a monospaced and a reverse-contrast display.
Work Experience
Features
I was honoured to be selected as one of three finalists of The Malee Scholarship 2021, a scholarship fund initiated and funded by Sharp Type, to support and empower women of colour in type design field.
Rarau mai Living city, an immersive exhibition exploring the city of Auckland through the use of data. The installation was designed by Auckland War Memorial and OOM Creative and includes contributions from Dr. Michael Dunbar, my Masters supervisor. I was approached by OOM Creative to design Māori pixel font families for use in the LED data display, a dynamic text-based visualisation. Drawing on expertise with diacritics which I developed through my Masters research project designing Vietnamese typefaces, two pixel fonts were extended to crisply display Te Reo Māori.
"Her Design Stories" is a feminist design project that aims to support and empower female designers in Vietnam. Its mission is to increase the visibility of Vietnamese female designers, and to encourage more girls & women to pursue a career in art & design. The project plans to achieve its goal through a series of conversations with successful women in the field, as well as design showcases from those female creatives.
Awards
The Malee Scholarship was established in 2019 and funded by Sharp Type Co. with a mission to advance and empower women who are part of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in the type design field. I was honoured to be one of the 2021 finalists.
Writing
An essay on Vietnamese typography and my type journey. Seeing how type design is still perceived as a ‘Western-centric’ discipline, I hope to minimise the dissimilarity gap between the markets in the future.
Speaking
Event Description — In recent years a cohort of diverse, progressive and culturally-aware practitioners in the highly specialised field of type design has emerged from Australia and New Zealand. Counter Forms is a website and publication that provide a platform for contemporary Antipodean type designers to present their work, research, philosophies and opinions through the lens of the key Design week themes: Transparency, Currency, Legacy.
I was honoured to be part of the launch panel convened by Dominic Hofstede and Vincent Chan. There, I had the opportunity to learn about the incredible practices of Vincent and Wei, talk about my collective with talented friends at Lưu Chữ, and share my love for typography with the crowd at Melbourne Art Book Fair.
Volunteering
Vietnamese Museum Australia is the first museum in Australia dedicated to preserving and sharing the incredible story of the Vietnamese refugee settlement. Together with The Trusted Voice and an internal designer, we worked on redesigning and developing the website. We moved away from Wix to the open-source solution WordPress, and used the Elementor web builder with advanced custom fields to build a new website with a fresh look. The site now features different content types including news, stories, and events.