4 ms·

A new typeface family of this scope doesn't come along very often. Sure, plenty of new fonts come out, but they contain mostly one to four styles (Roman/Oblique

A new typeface family of this scope doesn't come along very often. Sure, plenty of new fonts come out, but they contain mostly one to four styles (Roman/Oblique Normal/Bold) and have a special purpose. Two great examples are Matthew Carter's Bell Centennial (for phone book printing) and his Carter Sans (which I use for short chunks of copy). Kris Holmes's and Chuck Bigelow's Lucida is one of the most recent comprehensive new type families, and that's from a generation ago. Other computer companies (Digital for example) helped support their effort. So this is a big deal. It's a huge effort, and they made it open source and free. That's great. Thanks IBM, for supporting type designers. No doubt some of them are early in their careers. IBM's support has definitely given them a leg up. IBM will help us see another generation of new type. It has decent ligatures ("fi" for example, look at the Slack desktop app's type to see what a ligature looks like). It only has one style of digits (figures, typeheads call them) rather than the choice of proportional and lining. But this is the 21st century and proportional figures are known as "old style". It's no surprise the team wanted to make an artists' statement about their purposes and choices, and personally I found it (their web site) worth reading. It was a big nuisance to navigate, though. I hope IBM can emerge from the cloud wars intact. It's gonna take focus. Unfortunately, a new typeface doesn't look like focus.

chrstphrknwtn 9y ago
Typefaces of this quality and scope come along all the time. I don't really understand how it's a big deal. Take Source {Sans, Serif, Code) Pro, by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe (also open source); it's arguably a better typeface for user interfaces, and is a much better interpretation of Franklin Gothic and related Morris Fuller Benton gothics (as Plex claims in some areas.) Also Apple's San Francisco, admittedly missing a serif variant, is a similarly broadly scoped project... of much higher quality. Both of the above typefaces have fonts with character sets / glyph counts exceeding Plex: Plex Sans Regular - 663, Source Sans Pro Regular - 832, SF Pro Text Regular - 2439. IBM Plex as an open source font is cool, however I think is of limited use to the broader design community... the formal qualities carried over from Paul Rand's IBM logo make it too idiosyncratic to use outside IBM products. For IBM, I think it's awesome, especially considering it's replacing Helvetica. Also, your terminology for figure styles is inaccurate. Proportional means of variable horizontal width (not monospaced), where the alternative is tabular figures (monospaced for tables). Old style figures can be either of the above, however their form is more like lowercase characters (an 'old style') that tend to work better in continuous text.

chrstphrknwtn 9y ago

Typefaces of this quality and scope come along all the time. I don't really understand how it's a big deal. Take Source {Sans, Serif, Code) Pro, by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe (also open source); it's arguably a better typeface for user interfaces, and is a much better interpretation of Franklin Gothic and related Morris Fuller Benton gothics (as Plex claims in some areas.) Also Apple's San Francisco, admittedly missing a serif variant, is a similarly broadly scoped project... of much higher quality. Both of the above typefaces have fonts with character sets / glyph counts exceeding Plex: Plex Sans Regular - 663, Source Sans Pro Regular - 832, SF Pro Text Regular - 2439. IBM Plex as an open source font is cool, however I think is of limited use to the broader design community... the formal qualities carried over from Paul Rand's IBM logo make it too idiosyncratic to use outside IBM products. For IBM, I think it's awesome, especially considering it's replacing Helvetica. Also, your terminology for figure styles is inaccurate. Proportional means of variable horizontal width (not monospaced), where the alternative is tabular figures (monospaced for tables). Old style figures can be either of the above, however their form is more like lowercase characters (an 'old style') that tend to work better in continuous text.