Vietnam Festival of Media & Design: Hanoi 2019

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Celebrating Boundless Creativity

Vietnam Festival of Media & Design: Hanoi 2019 is the first event of its kind in Vietnam. It celebrated the country's creativity, design, and culture with a series of events and activities in both traditional and contemporary arts. The theme of this year festival is “Creative City”, in celebration of Vietnam’s capital receiving its status as a UNESCO-recognized creative city.

The highlight of the visual expression is its bespoke typeface and design system. Ba Đình, a bold geometric sans serif, is a juxtaposition of Hanoi’s culture and media/design contexts. We came up with a system that not only translates the idea of Hanoi as a multi-layered cultural city, but also realizes the potential of having multiple variations.

In order to construct the base skeleton of Ba Đình, we dug deep into remnants of Hanoi’s typographic designs and prints from the past, from vintage ephemerals, to ghost signs, and vernacular type. We studied these fragments closely to compose a typeface that is quintessentially Hanoi; Ba Đình possesses a variety of characteristics that one would instantly associate with the city's aesthetics.

Each letter in the typeface is then assembled using a collection of modules, purposefully positioned on three separate layers. This allows the system to maximize its flexibility, and thus, generate a unique yet coherent series of artworks.

We also focused on the most familiar visual aspects of Hanoi, including architecture, performance art, craftsmanship, and folk woodcut painting. The modules within each letterform were illustrated from these 4 categories, carrying along such distinct characteristics.

The generative typeface is programmed to come up with a randomly combined set of such elements, with randomly assigned colors to create a different glyph every time a letter is typed. Each letter would ultimately have thousands of variations.