Designers and typographers nowadays have more options to choose typefaces in their design compared to one-hundred years ago as the typeface design industry is growing fast recently. New font families are released every day from sans-serif to display typefaces since the needs of customised typefaces. Additionally, the demand for multilingual typefaces is increasing as well, especially those who support minority languages or non-Latin languages. Nonetheless, the majority of typefaces can only support English or other languages that lack diacritical marks. For some languages, those diacritics are the fundamental and compulsory standards (Cheng 2006). Particularly in the Vietnamese language, those diacritical marks are the essential factors for native readers to recognise and interpret the text (Trương 2015). Sometimes typing Vietnamese characters with diacritics on webpages is difficult as they will only present little square boxes or default fonts instead of chosen fonts. On the other hand, some typefaces contain a full set of diacritic glyphs but with wrong positioning. This misplaced positioning utterly changes the meaning of the text and leads to incorrect interpretation of readers (Turčić 2011).

The goal of this practice-based research aims to establish an analytical framework for typographers, type designers, and designers to look at and follow as references. It will describe the historical context of the Vietnamese writing system and discuss the details of Vietnamese diacritics as well as the appropriate way of positioning them. Besides, the research shows the implementation by creating two different fonts as an application of the design system generated from the learnings.