Phudu
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource-variable/phudu2. Import in App
import '@fontsource-variable/phudu/wght.css';3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Phudu Variable", system-ui;
}Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style -->Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* phudu-latin-wght-normal */
@font-face {
font-family: "Phudu Variable";
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
font-weight: 100 900;
src: url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/fontsource/fonts/phudu:vf@latest/latin-wght-normal.woff2)
format("woff2-variations");
}Background & Story
Phudu is a sans-serif display typeface inspired by Vietnamese hand-lettering billboards in the old days, that supports a wide range of languages by Duong Tran. As a new way to achieve variable font, the lighterPhudu gets, the extended it becomes, for people to read it easier compared to other lightweight narrow typefaces.
In the progress of learning and crafting types, Duong has always thought about what makes a Vietnamese typeface. If we rewind to the past, we can see a Vietnamese lettering style on the billboard stores, when the artists adapted Latin typefaces and then added marks based on their styles. Among those, there were mostly all-caps sans-serif types played as descriptions or the store's names themself. To make a new easy-to-read and easy-to-get typeface, Duong mixed some of the researched letters from the story above. He doesn't want to just revive the types, he wants to improve them to fit the modern-day styles, but still have "Vietnamese" souls in them. The typeface was named Phudu (phục dựng) - "revival" in Vietnamese, and has a meaning of timeless (quite the opposite of the name when it can be read as "phù du" - ephemeral).
To contribute, see github.com/duongtrtype/DTPhudu
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource-variable/phuduDesigned by
Dương Trần
Links
License
OFL-1.1