Chữ Vòng
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chuvong.php Chữ Vòng, literally "circle script", is an alternative alphabet for Vietnamese invented by Albert Nguyen. The motivation to create Chữ Vòng came from the desire to mimic the ability of Korean and Japanese, which also once used Chinese as the sole writing system, to maintain the use of Chinese characters along with their own phonetic writing systems. While Chữ Nôm is a good way to represent native Vietnamese words, it is cumbersome, takes years of study to master, and it has not been updated for modern Vietnamese. Quốc Ngữ is simple and flexible, but is not written in blocks and so does not support Chữ Nho (Chinese characters). Chữ Vòng provides a purely phonetic syllabic script that is flexible enough to import new words as necessary and is much easier to learn than Chữ Nôm. It looks like to me that Mr. Nguyen while attempting to replace a "cumbersome" system that "takes years to master" created an overly ornate system that will take months to master. It does have an aesthetic appeal, but it doesn't seem to help the Vietnamese learner...at least from my view.

It looks nice, but it does look rather complex.

Well, i guess optimization just takes time... I like that it keeps the Chinese characters look but looks much more regular, there are no simple characters here and there and more complex ones, it do looses that aesthetically and its kind of boring(not that that is the most important in this situation).

When I first saw the script I had decidedly liked it, because it is nice that he attempted to keep a hanzi-like look to it, while including a lot of the complicated elements of Vietnamese. Of all things in the script however, the only one thing that bothers me is the circle. It's really out of place, and although it serves an important role when marking vowels, it should have just been a brush stroke, not a circle. As for the consonants, they could have done without the circles; it seems as if the author tried to incorporate a stylistic element from other South East Asian abugidas, but only that one part.