The global design world is still looking at Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Mexico City. It should be looking at Saigon.
Design Magazine Editorial Team | 2026
A City That Designs Differently
There is a particular quality of light in Saigon at dusk — a warm, saturated amber that bleeds through the narrow gaps between buildings, across the tangled overhead wires, and into the open-fronted cafés where a new generation of Vietnamese designers are building something the global design industry has not yet fully reckoned with.
Ho Chi Minh City is not on most people’s shortlist of design capitals. That list tends to begin and end with the usual centres of gravity: Tokyo’s precision, Copenhagen’s restraint, Milan’s material mastery, Mexico City’s chromatic audacity. Saigon, if it appears at all, is typically filed under “emerging” — the polite euphemism the design world reserves for places it hasn’t bothered to look at properly.
That oversight is becoming harder to sustain. Dwell recently profiled Ho Chi Minh City as a significant design destination, with a thriving ecosystem of studios, concept stores, and a community of diaspora creatives who have returned from abroad to build something rooted in Vietnamese identity. Wallpaper* has covered the city’s biophilic architecture wave. Dezeen regularly features its residential and public projects. Disegno dedicated a feature to Vietnamese typographic revival. And yet, in the broader design discourse — the conferences, the trend reports, the award circuits — Vietnam remains conspicuously absent from the conversation.
This article is not a city guide. It is an argument. Saigon’s design scene is not “emerging.” It is producing work of genuine philosophical and aesthetic significance — work that addresses questions the global design industry is only just beginning to ask: How do you build a design identity from the ruins of colonialism? How do you preserve vernacular culture while participating in globalisation? How do you design for a city that is simultaneously ancient and being rebuilt in real time?
These are not niche concerns. They are the central design questions of the twenty-first century. And Saigon is answering them with more rigour, more originality, and more integrity than most of the cities that currently dominate the design conversation.
The Return: Diaspora Designers and the Rediscovery of Vietnamese Identity {#the-return}
The single most important force shaping Saigon’s design culture is not a trend, a technology, or an institution. It is a generation of Vietnamese creatives who left — to study in the United States, Japan, Australia, Europe — and then came back.
Tuan Le, founder of The Lab Saigon, a branding and interior architecture studio, is one of them. Born in Vietnam, raised in Los Angeles, with years in San Francisco, Dubai, and Tokyo behind him, Le returned to Ho Chi Minh City in 2013. He is far from alone. As he told Dwell, a significant number of people in Saigon’s creative community share his trajectory — diaspora Vietnamese who repatriated not out of obligation but out of conviction. Vietnamese culture had been put on the back burner as the country pursued globalisation, but now everybody wants to rediscover their roots.
This dynamic — outward education, inward return — produces a design sensibility that is distinct from anything being created elsewhere. These designers carry fluency in international design languages (Swiss grids, Japanese minimalism, American branding methodology) but apply it to source material that is irreducibly local: the hand-painted signage of Chợ Lớn, the layered ironwork of colonial villas, the spatial logic of tube houses, the chromatic intensity of Tết markets. The result is neither pastiche nor assimilation. It is something more dialectical: a continuous negotiation between the global and the vernacular, played out in real time, in a city that is itself a living record of that negotiation.
This is not happening at the margins. Studios like The Lab, Behalf Studio, MaiMai Design Studio, and NUEX Creative are producing branding, spatial, and typographic work that holds its own against any agency in Sydney, London, or New York. The difference is that their work carries something those agencies cannot manufacture: an authentic relationship with the cultural material they are drawing from.
Republish: Digitising the Disappearing {#republish}
If there is a single project that crystallises what makes Saigon’s design culture exceptional, it is Republish — a research-driven type foundry run by Behalf Studio and founded by graphic designer and RMIT lecturer Giang Nguyen.
Republish does something deceptively simple: it takes Vietnamese typographic remnants — the hand-painted signage, concrete lettering, and printed ephemera that are slowly vanishing from the city’s streetscape — and transforms them into open-source digital typefaces, each accompanied by comprehensive historical research.
The Westgate typeface, for example, is derived from the concrete lettering on the gates of Saigon’s iconic Bến Thành Market, dating to a mid-twentieth-century renovation. The letterforms carry the elegant condensed geometry of the French colonial Art Deco period, but what makes them remarkable is how the Vietnamese diacritical marks — the tonal accents that are essential to the language — are harmoniously integrated into the letterforms. This is not a technical detail. It is a philosophical statement: that Vietnamese typography need not be an awkward accommodation of Latin letterforms, but a design tradition in its own right, with its own logic and its own beauty.
The Barber typeface preserves the craft of sign-painting from Saigon’s District 5 — the Chợ Lớn Chinatown area — where a barbershop sign from the mid-1980s, later hidden behind a newer metal facade, became the basis for a chromatic display typeface that captures the dimensional hand-painted effects of an era that has all but vanished. Đanh Đá, meanwhile, draws from twentieth-century Vietnamese women’s magazines, developed in collaboration with Chicago-based artist Hương Ngô for a project exploring the translation of “feminism” into Vietnamese — a word whose conceptual complexity was obscured by the class-based priorities of the Communist movement.
Republish’s typefaces are free, open-source, and available on Adobe Fonts. But the project’s significance extends far beyond utility. As Saigoneer reported, Giang Nguyen’s impulse began during his master’s programme in the United States, when distance sharpened his awareness of what was disappearing at home. He was watching a city eager to modernise, and he started feeling a sense of melancholy as nostalgic elements were taken down. The decision to make this work public was, by his own account, partly motivated by urgency — the frank recognition that if this knowledge wasn’t documented and shared, it could be lost.
What Republish demonstrates — and what the global design industry should be paying far closer attention to — is that vernacular typography is not nostalgia. It is design research of the highest order. It is the recovery and reinterpretation of formal systems that evolved in response to specific linguistic, cultural, and material conditions. And it is being done with more intellectual seriousness in a studio in Saigon than in most of the design schools that claim to teach design history.
For a deeper exploration of what typographic heritage means in an age of algorithmic mediation, see our companion essay: Branding in the Age of Meaning Collapse: When AI Agents Replace the Human Gaze.
Building With the Jungle: Vietnam’s Biophilic Architecture {#biophilic-architecture}
If Republish represents the preservation of Vietnamese design memory, the architecture of Vo Trong Nghia represents its projection into the future.
Vo Trong Nghia trained in Japan and returned to Vietnam to found VTN Architects, now one of the most internationally recognised practices working on the continent. His work — bamboo pavilions, vine-covered residential towers, schools built from rammed earth and local materials — has become a shorthand for what Vietnamese architecture can be when it stops imitating Western models and starts listening to its own landscape.
The philosophy is biophilic, but the ambition is political. As Vo Trong Nghia has articulated in Interior Design magazine, if people form an emotional attachment to a space, it is less likely to be torn down — a statement that carries particular weight in a country where rapid urbanisation has produced what he describes as an untenable cycle of destruction and construction. Ho Chi Minh City, by some accounts, has lost half its urban greenery in the past decade of expansion. Vo Trong Nghia’s work is not decorative greenwashing. It is a design argument against the logic of speculative development that is consuming the city.
His bamboo structures — the Vedana Resort Restaurant, the Bamboo Forest pavilion exhibited at Tokyo’s TOTO Gallery MA, the recently completed Nuoc Ui School in the mountainous Tra Mai commune — use bamboo treated with traditional Vietnamese methods, assembled without metal joints, using only bamboo pegs and rope. The construction process itself becomes a design statement: a demonstration that local material knowledge, passed down through generations, can produce structures of formal sophistication that rival anything built with steel and glass.
But Vo Trong Nghia is not an isolated figure. Across Vietnam, a generation of architects — Tropical Space in Da Nang, Farming Architects in Hanoi, 1+1>2 Architects, Kientruc O, K59 Atelier — are developing a design language that is distinctly Vietnamese without being revivalist. They share an interest in natural ventilation, local materials, the interpenetration of interior and exterior space, and a scaled intimacy that reflects the spatial logic of Vietnamese domestic life. This is not an aesthetic movement. It is an architectural culture — a shared set of values and formal strategies that have evolved in response to specific climatic, economic, and cultural conditions.
The global design press is beginning to notice. Dezeen’s coverage of Ho Chi Minh City projects is increasingly regular. Architizer ranks Vietnamese firms among the region’s most significant. But the attention remains largely project-by-project, building-by-building. What is missing is recognition that these individual projects constitute a movement — one that has philosophical coherence and that offers something the international design conversation desperately needs: a model of how to design with place rather than against it.
The Spaces Between: Concept Stores, Creative Districts, and the Infrastructure of a Scene {#creative-infrastructure}
A design scene is not just studios and practitioners. It is infrastructure: the physical and social spaces where creative people encounter each other’s work, where ideas cross-pollinate, where a city’s design identity becomes visible not just to the international press but to the city itself.
Saigon’s creative infrastructure is young, uneven, and thrilling. L’Usine Saigon Centre operates as a gallery-cum-concept-store where minimalist Vietnamese clothing brands are displayed alongside curated design objects. Man Moi, in the same district, functions as a Vietnamese lifestyle boutique and restaurant — a space where the ambience is as carefully considered as the menu, and where homeware, clothing, and curated objects articulate what the city’s emerging design language actually looks like in three dimensions. The Café Apartments — a nine-storey residential building repurposed into a vertical village of indie coffee shops, boutiques, and co-working spaces — has become an unofficial emblem of Saigon’s creative improvisation: not planned, not polished, but alive with the kind of energy that no master-planned creative quarter can replicate.
District 3 has become a gravitational centre for studios and makers. The Phạm Viết Chánh neighbourhood in Bình Thạnh district is another. Pop-ups, residencies, and informal gatherings — like those hosted by New York and Ho Chi Minh City-based fashion designer Kaarem — serve as the connective tissue of a community that, as Tuan Le told Dwell, bands together precisely because resources are scarce. Everyone in Ho Chi Minh City’s design community helps each other. There isn’t a lot of money going around for the younger creatives, so they collaborate out of necessity and solidarity.
This is worth pausing over. The design scenes that attract the most international attention are typically those with the most institutional support: government funding, established galleries, design weeks, award infrastructure. Saigon has almost none of this. What it has instead is a self-organising creative ecosystem driven by conviction rather than subsidy. This gives the scene a quality of authenticity that institutionally supported scenes often struggle to maintain — but it also means the work being produced is chronically under-documented, under-funded, and under-recognised.
Brands like District Eight, a Ho Chi Minh City furniture company working with international designers including Milan-based Vietnamese designer Toan Nguyen, demonstrate what happens when this creative energy meets production capacity. As District Eight has articulated, Vietnamese design is defined less by ostentation and more by an intrinsic depth reflecting centuries of cultural layering — a language of subtlety and robust presence crafted in the shadows of imperial pagodas, the rhythmic patterns of rural villages, and the gentle verses of spiritual symbolism.
The Diacritical Mark Problem: A Metaphor for Everything {#diacritical-marks}
There is a detail in the story of Vietnamese typography that functions as a metaphor for the city’s entire relationship with the global design world.
Vietnamese is written in a Latin-derived script — Chữ Quốc Ngữ — but it uses an elaborate system of diacritical marks (the accents, hooks, horns, and dots placed above and below letters) that indicate tonal pronunciation. These marks are linguistically essential: remove them, and the meaning of a word changes entirely. Vietnamese without diacritics is not simplified Vietnamese. It is incorrect Vietnamese.
And yet, the global design and publishing infrastructure has historically treated Vietnamese diacritics as an inconvenience. As Disegno reported, in 2023 novelist Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai noted in The New York Times that her diacritical marks had been removed to comply with the publication’s style — a practice she pointed out actively alters the meaning of her words. Most international typefaces support Vietnamese diacritics poorly if at all, treating the marks as afterthoughts bolted onto Latin letterforms rather than as integral elements of a writing system with its own design requirements.
This is not a technical problem. It is a power structure made visible through typography. The assumption that Latin letterforms are the default, and that other scripts must adapt to them, is a design-level manifestation of the same hierarchies that position Vietnamese design as “emerging” and Scandinavian design as “established.” The designers working on Vietnamese typographic revival — Behalf Studio, Donny Truong (whose book Vietnamese Typography has become a foundational resource), the Lưu Chữ collective documenting street signage across the country, and Quynhhuong Nguyen whose lettering work celebrates Vietnamese idioms and language — are not merely making fonts. They are challenging the ontological assumptions embedded in the tools the global design industry uses every day.
As Quynhhuong Nguyen has articulated through Design by Women, the challenge extends beyond technical capacity to the question of representation itself: how to make creativity thrive in an environment where there is a lack of education, how to find the right design resources for self-taught designers, and what opportunities exist for creatives who don’t have the chance to integrate internationally.
What the Design World Should Learn From Saigon {#what-the-world-should-learn}
The design scenes that matter most are not always the ones with the highest production values. They are the ones that are asking the most urgent questions and answering them with the most integrity.
Saigon’s design scene is asking: What does it mean to build a design identity in a postcolonial context? What is the relationship between preservation and innovation in a city that is being rebuilt faster than it can be documented? How do you design with cultural specificity in a globalised market without becoming a souvenir of yourself? How do you support a creative community without the institutional infrastructure that Western design scenes take for granted?
These questions are not unique to Vietnam. They are shared by design communities across Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific — the places that the global design industry has historically categorised as sources of “inspiration” rather than centres of intellectual production. What makes Saigon remarkable is not that it has answered these questions definitively, but that it is producing work of sufficient depth and rigour that the answers deserve to be taken seriously at the highest levels of design discourse.
The global design conversation has been running on a surprisingly narrow set of references for a long time. Scandinavian functionalism. Japanese wabi-sabi. German industrial logic. Italian material sensuality. These are all legitimate and profound design traditions. But they are not the only ones. And the assumption that design thinking originates in Northern Europe and East Asia, with the rest of the world providing raw material and manufacturing capacity, is not just intellectually lazy — it is historically inaccurate, creatively impoverishing, and, in 2026, increasingly untenable. As Dezeen’s 2026 trend predictions noted, the localisation of design culture could lead to the emergence of significant projects from nations not normally considered “design countries” — a framing that itself reveals the problem.
Saigon does not need the global design world’s permission to be taken seriously. The work is already there: in the typefaces being recovered from disappearing street signs, in the bamboo pavilions assembled without a single metal joint, in the concept stores where Vietnamese design identity is being articulated in real time, in the studios where diaspora designers are weaving international fluency with irreducible locality.
What the global design world needs is to stop treating Vietnamese design as a discovery — something that gains legitimacy only when a Western publication decides to notice it — and start treating it as what it is: a mature, philosophically grounded, and aesthetically distinctive design culture that has been producing significant work for years.
The revolution is not coming. It is already here. It has been here. The only question is how much longer the rest of the world will take to pay attention.
Jessica Tavitian is Co-Founder and Design Director at TDS Australia, a brand design and web development agency operating between Sydney and Saigon. She is the founder of Design Magazine.
Related Reading:
- Branding in the Age of Meaning Collapse: When AI Agents Replace the Human Gaze
- The Colonialism of “Good Design”: Who Decides What Design Excellence Looks Like?
- The Anti-AI Aesthetic: Why Imperfection Is the New Brand Strategy
References & Further Reading
- Dwell — “Design Cities: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam” (2025)
- Disegno Journal — “The Past is the Future: Vietnamese Typography” (2025)
- Behalf Studio — Republish: A Vietnamese Typography Project
- Behalf Studio — Republish: Typography As… Exhibition
- Saigoneer — “Local Designers Create Typefaces Inspired by a Bygone Era”
- Saigoneer — “Lost Type: Capturing the Essence of Vietnam’s Street Signage Through Modern Typeface”
- Grafis Masa Kini — “The Development of Vietnamese Vernacular Typography” (2024)
- Donny Truong — Vietnamese Typography
- Design by Women — Quynhhuong Nguyen Profile
- District Eight — “Vietnamese Designs Through the Lens of International Designers”
- VTN Architects — Portfolio & Projects
- Interior Design — “Architect Vo Trong Nghia Shares Insight into his Environmentally-Friendly Bamboo Structures”
- Architecture Now — “Biophilic Vietnam: Vo Trong Nghia”
- Designboom — “Vo Trong Nghia Builds School from Rammed Earth and Bamboo” (2025)
- Wallpaper* — “Vietnam’s Biophilic New Architecture Scene”
- Dezeen — Ho Chi Minh City Architecture & Design
- Dezeen — “Design Could See ‘Long Overdue Shift’ in 2026” (2026)
- Architizer — “30 Best Architecture and Design Firms in Vietnam” (2025)
- Architizer — “Light as a Feather: The Cultural Architecture of Vietnam”
- Fora Travel — “A Design Lover’s Guide to Ho Chi Minh City” (2025)
