Phudu

Old Vietnamese shop billboards were lettered by hand, and the sign painters did something particular with them. They took Latin typefaces they had seen, mostly plain capitals without serifs, and added the Vietnamese marks in their own manner, so every shop name came out with its own accents stacked and placed by eye. Dương Trần has long asked himself what makes a typeface look Vietnamese, and Phudu is where he went for an answer.

He gathered letters from those signs and redrew them for current use. A straight revival was never the plan: the shapes were adjusted for modern work, and the accents were kept as the center of the design.

The name

Phục dựng means revival in Vietnamese, and Phudu is a shortened form of it. Trần points out the joke inside it, since the same letters can be read as phù du, which means ephemeral, about as far from a revival as a word can get.

The weights do something unusual. As Phudu gets lighter it also gets wider, so the Light at 300 spreads out where most light weights pinch in, and stays easy to read at sizes where a thin narrow face would not. The family runs in 7 upright steps to Black at 900, with no italics.

Vietnamese is covered properly, as you would expect. Put the Black on a night market poster and a Light subhead under it, and the 2 will look like they came off the same street.