Plex; IBM's new font identity model

John Hudson

You're still having this conversation?

Going back to the original post, is there perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding or mischaracterisation of the entire IBM Plex project? Looking through the publicity material regarding IBM, I don't see anything that suggests the project was ever conceived as primarily or even significantly a branding typeface. The type is described as 'distinctively IBM', but that refers to its design characteristics and how these echo aspects of IBM's industrial and corporate design history, not its intended use.

The purpose of the new types is to replace and extend the coverage previously provided by the custom Helvetica version developed for IBM by Linotype, which was subsequently released as Helvetica Linotype and Helvetica World — so also not exclusive to IBM. That Helvetica was not a branding type, but rather a core font for IBM systems.

In terms of parallels with other large corporate commissioned type families, the most obvious one is another open source project: Noto. The goal is to support a wide range of scripts and language in a coordinated design style directed by the client corporation, which benefits in numerous ways from having the fonts open source and widely utilised.

Nick Shinn

Just another huge American tech corporation flooding the world with free fonts, to the ongoing chagrin of indie type foundries.

Chris Lozos

Yes, some people did that with compass and ruler back in the modern days,

a bit of an oversimplification, Thomas ;-)

I was one of those people, but we were not blind way back then either.  Curve to straight was a point of pride, back then. We made good use of brush and pen, and photostat to ensure that none of those Broke-back Mountain joins ever ended up on press.

We still do it today by pushing and pulling points and handles, or adding a needed point.  I must admit, today's methods are much, much easier and require far less dexterity, also no "undo" back then.

Thomas Phinney

I actually meant “modern” in the type design sense of the 1920s. Famously, Paul Renner.

But accusing me of oversimplification ... you seem to be skipping the rest of my post. I was very clear that plenty of people have done “geometric” typefaces with reasonable optical compensations. For example, Renner’s work was redrawn by more knowledgeable people at Bauer.

Maybe I wasn’t clear that using a compass and ruler didn’t make for bad work in and of itself—it was stopping at what those things produce, without further modifications, that sucks. People can and do make the same mistakes with digital tools—but better work is a bit easier, as you say.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

I haven't yet made the time to read the comments since my last post to this thread, but just wanted to leave this here...
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/53413/#Comment_53413
Google itself knows what's up.