In June 2014, the clock atop Bolivia’s Congress building in La Paz was reconfigured to run anti-clockwise. The change was described as a symbol of decolonisation for Indigenous Aymara and Quechua peoples, and a logical expression of southernness. Whereas the conventional clock hails from the northern hemisphere’s sun dial, a counter clock reclaims a connection to the sun dial south of the equator.

Watching Top Gun: Maverick last year came with an unexpected ‘Take My Breath Away’, delivering a scene where typography played a starring role. On reflection, in the air-conditioned cinema on a warm Amsterdam July Midday with my visiting Dad, I couldn’t have asked for a better way to collapse the time and space of my being. At the half-way mark of the movie (where time and space went their separate ways again) Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell [Tom Cruise] is summoned to a conversation with his arch frenemy, Admiral Tom ‘Iceman’ Kasansky [Val Kilmer]. Things aren’t going well at Top Gun. A reluctant and pig-headed Maverick has been ordered to train a group of young hot-shot pilots—including the still-bitter son of his deceased wing-man—for an ostensibly impossible mission: To destroy an underground uranium enrichment plant situated below the surface of a crater, only accessible only through a steep valley that is heavily defended by ground and air weaponry.

It’s 2023. I’m in my studio in Finsbury Park, flipping through the Encyclopaedia of Typefaces. On page 335, I notice a specimen of Spartan, the Book weight, with strange proportions on its capital letters. I wonder whether there’s a lowercase alphabet to match. Google and Fonts In Use provide no leads, and I feel too lazy to search harder. It’s probably already been revived. Maybe I’ll change it to look more like ITC Avant Garde. Maybe I’ll mix it with some Neo-Grotesque features, so I can say I’ve added something. I take a photo of the page with my iPhone and AirDrop the JPEG to my MacBook Pro. I open up Glyphs 3 and start to draw with the image in the background layer.

Linguists don’t divide languages into “oral” and “written” languages; nothing special changes about a language once a writing system is developed or used. As children, we learn the sounds and grammar of language through hearing it spoken to us and around us (or signed, for people who grow up with access to a sign language). We have a fairly mature grasp of the structure of our first language or languages by the time we start learning to read and write, which has to be done through explicit instruction. Language exists independently of writing; writing is simply a technology and a practice that some societies use and others do not. It is a technology that is relatively new to this continent, where, at the time of colonisation, hundreds of incredibly diverse languages were spoken but not written (although there were and still are other types of complex visual semiotic systems).

My interest in letterforms has grown over time, sparked by a variety of experiences. I was born and raised in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), a city that blends vintage and modern design styles. Sometimes it's the hand-painted signs that catch my eye, while other times it's the letters I first wrote with a fountain pen in primary school. Even a piece of food packaging designed in Cooper Black can grab my attention. Although there are some typographic elements similar to those in the West, Vietnam still has its own unique style. Let me walk you through this “same same but different”.