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You missed the most important part; it was initiated by a team of lawyers who were tipped off by another team who noticed the Watson design team were using a ty
by krona 9y ago
You missed the most important part; it was initiated by a team of lawyers who were tipped off by another team who noticed the Watson design team were using a typeface on public websites which they didn't have the copyright to, and certainly didn't have the license to redistribute.
Almost 2 years later, Plex was born.
(This is a true story, by the way.)
- dawnerd 9y ago> Plex was born. And then they get sued by Plex, Inc and starts over.
- mark-r 9y agoThanks for that, I was wondering why they went to all the trouble of designing a new typeface. The thing I haven't figured out yet is why they made it open source rather than keeping it exclusively for their own use.
- epc 9y agoI'd hope you were kidding, because I went through this very thing, at IBM, in the 1990s and got a corporate legal standard put in place. Or so I thought, because I'm fairly certain everything we did in the 1990s has been thoroughly erased by ridiculous document retention policies.
- codingdave 9y agoAlso having worked at IBM in the 1990s, I can confirm that having corporate standards in place had little to do with what any individual team/department/division actually put on the public web sites. Pretty much the only bit that was controlled and monitored was the page header.
- Maxious 9y ago"we are in the process of acquiring the rights and licensing for Helvetica Neue for IBM" [2015] https://github.com/IBM-Watson/design-guide/issues/120 https://github.com/IBM-Watson/design-guide/issues/120
- noobermin 9y agoI actually don't hate the typeface (plex) but this backstory is just bonkers
- i_feel_great 9y agoYou missed the part where IBM outsourced the work out to a team in China, which outsourced part of it to a team in the Phillipines, which outsourced part of it to a team in India, which copy-pasted some open-sourced typeface made by some guy in the US.