IBM Type
ibm.github.io
ibm.github.io
Some things to keep in mind:
— v1 will not be released until early next year. We published publicly so it is easy for teams to test and give feedback.
— The documentation site was a quickfix and will merge into a silky smooth GatsbyJS site later. Give that project some love at https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
— We are constantly making breaking changes until v1 based on font-loading performance, design specs, and more
The title on Github (and here) say "IBM Type."
But what is IBM Type? It's never explained. Instead the site leads off with an explanation of typography. Then it introduces a specific type. It never tells us what "IBM Type" encompasses or if it is a project, a group, a new thing, and old thing, a software package, a consulting service... etc... yes it says some revisions are coming, and it will be out of beta soon, but what is it?
This is again another project without a proper introduction. All too common on Github and other OSS sites.
That being said, the teaching examples on typography embedded in the document are great.
E.g., look at https://github.com/camlistore/go4. Unless your monitor height is 1600 px and you're using 90% browser zoom, you might not even see the README until you scroll down.
You can also link to #readme, which is a generic tag at the very top of the README and is guaranteed to exist in every github repo. E.g.:
This irritates me greatly. I can understand somewhat the justification against pure white (a poor attempt at compensating for monitors being set by default to insane levels of brightness), but pure black? It doesn't make sense to reduce contrast this way.
I sometimes imagine making a "designer" read through a long HTML book set in 20pt #ddd-on-#fff Raleway with the lowest weight possible, on a crappy full-brighness laptop screen. He'd be bound to a chair with his eyed forced open and his direction fixed. Maybe then he'd learn to not torment people's eyes.
HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you play around with black text on a white background, you should find that a few HEX notches above #000 (say #333, for example) is much more pleasant to look at.
The abstinence of pure black doesn't irritate me, but taking design advice from IBM does :)
[0] - https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/25356/why-...
And I immediately tried that. My impression: it miiight be pleasant to look at, subjectively; but it's harder to read, which is the actual purpose of text (most of the time).
It wasn't always that way, maybe something to do with my current eyeglass prescription, or just fatigue from staring at monitors all day? I don't know.
But regardless, one of the things I've learned about UI design is not to dismiss other people's concerns about text readability. Just because you have great eyes (for now), doesn't mean everyone else does too. :)
Pure B&W on high brightness is awesome out in broad daylight but of course terrible indoors with lights off and the same display settings.
But is that the fault of the colors?
It sounds vaguely like an appeal to authority suggesting that IBM is not in a position to give advice. Can you expand on that?
Why? As many other HNers have pointed out, the site that the font is being showcased on is hardly the pinnacle of good web design.
@media print { ... }No, there is no contrast issue with printed type. The problems with displays isn't their high contrast but overall poor ergonomics and usually completely moronic default brightnesses.
Reflected vs. emitted light.
I do question the 75 characters per line, though - is it just me or can that be a tad too short for body text if a larger font size set the width somewhere?
Also, on a funny note: the very last image of the page shows a sample of IBM Plex Mono... And uses "fancy" ldquo/rdquo in code. Clearly not enough developers were consulted in drafting this document!
What concerns me is that they suggest 38% of the viewport width, wasting 62% of my screen.
For almost twenty years I used a browser window at half my screen width, with a console or other application in the other half. That's no longer possible, due to the number of sites which assume that browser windows are always full screen.
I like a 72-character width; I just don't want scads of wasted space on either side of those characters.
Which reminds me I need to figure out if I can make it the default view for some sites.
https://www-304.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pa...
The current one screams “1990” at anybody reading.
Now they need something that is distinctly IBM while gently whispering “2020” into the readers ear.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+paul+rand&source=lnms&tb...:
The rest seems quite nice, even if the chosen letter spacing feels a little weird
MISC FIXED forever!
And did you mean Bold Monday? The ones who made the mono font for iA Writer?
fonts/ibm $ otfinfo -i IBMPlexSans-Regular.ttf Family: IBM Plex Sans Subfamily: Regular Full name: IBM Plex Sans PostScript name: IBMPlexSans Version: Version 1.000 Unique ID: 1.000;IBM ;IBMPlexSans Designer: Mike Abbink, Bold Monday Designer URL: http://www.ibm.com Manufacturer: Bold Monday Vendor URL: http://www.boldmonday.com Trademark: IBM Plex™ is a trademark of IBM Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Copyright: © 2017 IBM Corp. All rights reserved. Sample text: How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts! Vendor ID: IBM
Out of interest - What does IBM’s brand mean to you? (Serious question)
By that, I think I mean - what does IBM make you think of and what emotions does it instil in you when considering the company and brand?
IME, the overwhelming response I get from IBM employees to a problem is they tell me about their bureaucratic rules, with no flexibility, and not about solutions to my problem. It's like dealing with a computer algorithm: They follow very specific pre-written instructions, and cannot and will not deal with anything the programmer didn't specifically anticipate. They don't care that a problem exists or needs to be solved; they care only about following their algorithm. And the bureaucracy is so large and complex that they don't know who can solve the problem. When training customer-facing employees, I use IBM as an example of what not to do - it's your job is to solve the customer's problem, not the customer's, and your job is not to follow a procedure; procedures are tools, not outcomes.
I'm not blaming IBM's employees by the way; clearly that's a management and organizational problem. When I deal with people at organizations like that, I try to have sympathy - I only have to deal with these frustrations on the occasions I interact with their company; they have to do it all day, every day. They can't bend the rules and go out of their way to help every customer.
As long as I'm going on about this: IMHO it also deprives IBM the benefits of human intelligence - dealing with novel situation, innovating and solving problems, etc. Perhaps IBM's view of human work explains, to a some degree, their concept of AI that can replace people.
> Copyright © 2017 IBM Corp. with Reserved Font Name "Plex"
> This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
var scale = (n) => n ? scale(n-1) + Math.ceil((n-2) / 4) * 2 : 12;
[...Array(16).keys()].map(n => scale(n+2));
> Bold, Medium, Text, Extralight and Thin should not be used in websites.
Why not?
That said, the Bold is very, very heavy, and the Thin is very, very light. But I see nothing wrong with the Sans in Medium (taking the place of bold, usually), the Text (it's not bad) and the Extralight (if you really need that, which you probably don't.)
I also see that they banned #0 black text, presumably because they are elite. That's why all my browsers have Reader extensions now.
Sorry, consolas still undefeated.
font-family: ibm-plex-sans,'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;du -ch editorial-1.png editorial-3.png product-1.png product- 2.png product-3.png product-4.png 2,5M editorial-1.png 832K editorial-3.png 368K product-1.png 288K product-2.png 284K product-3.png 1,2M product-4.png 5,4M total
vs pngcrushed:
du -ch editorial-1.smaller.png editorial-3.smaller.png product-1.smaller.png product-2.smaller.png product-3.smaller.png product-4.smaller.png 2,0M editorial-1.smaller.png 612K editorial-3.smaller.png 188K product-1.smaller.png 192K product-2.smaller.png 184K product-3.smaller.png 876K product-4.smaller.png 4,0M total
[0] http://pointlessramblings.com/posts/pngquant_vs_pngcrush_vs_...
> pngcrush by Glenn Randers-Pehrson, available at http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush, is an open-source program that iterates over PNG filters and zlib (Deflate) parameters, compresses the image repeatedly using each parameter configuration, and chooses the configuration that yields the smallest compressed (IDAT) output. At the user's option, the program can explore few (below 10) or many (a brute-force traversal over more than 100) configurations. The method of selecting the parameters for "few" trials is particularly effective, and the use of a brute-force traversal is generally not recommended.
In addition, pngcrush offers a multitude of extra features, such as recovery of erroneous PNG files (e.g. files containing bad CRCs), and chunk-level editing of PNG meta-data.
Makes sense (that they are not) if the difference is just ~20% as in here.
A processor 20% faster would dominate the market for years. A new compression algorithm that was 20% smaller would be either copied or used by every archiving system. And yes, a website reduced by 20% is significant.
I doubt it. 20% is not even worth to turn a straightforward algorithm to a more complex and convoluted (but more performant) one, or to switch backend technology, or db store, etc.
As for a "20% faster processor"? Big deal, I was raised in an era when we got 2x faster processors every 2 years.
(Besides, we do have processors that are 20% faster than others, and they don't "dominate" the market, even at the same price range some might go for perceived quality stability -- e.g Intel vs AMD, over the small speed increase).
>And yes, a website reduced by 20% is significant.
To whom? It's as if people never heard of opportunity cost.
Just go measure how many websites, even leading ones, go to any great measure to reduce such bloat, and you'll find that it's not that significant in the real world. Up to a point, of which 20% is not even close, you can be bloated without punishment in the modern web.
If not using the correct tools, simply you won't survive for long in the market. Probabely you can still manage to sell domains or such, but can't compete in innovation-based sections.
I can see why companies like Apple and Microsoft would want to be involved in making fonts, they make their bread and butter by creating warm-fuzzies and having a consistent design language; IBM though, less so?
Genuinely interested to hear others thoughts.
Plex was introduced a few weeks ago internally with considerable uptake. Intranet articles and corporate comms look much nicer now :P
IBM also produced the Carbon Design System which influences most of their product offerings (most notably on IBM Cloud/Bluemix) http://carbondesignsystem.com/
Why would IBM not also benefit from a consistent design language? Irrespective of what people might think of their products, they are involved in a wide range of business sectors (services, desktop, mainframe, AI, etc.) and I would have thought that consistent typography would help to give them a more integrated feel.
Sure there is an element of "me to" about this - Google, MS, Apple, even Oracle and Atlassian have design languages - but as someone with a general interest in typography I thought this looked pretty good.
Of course wanting to create your own font is another level, but there's nothing wrong about wanting to choose the font on your site.
IBM building its own fonts to polish the nooks and crannies of their brand identity may well be such an instance where it is replicating behavior from the late 70's and early 80's of doing everything under the sun. Imho it should clearly not be a priority for them right now.
Typography is a fickle, subtle thing that can influence people without them being aware of it. While on HN, folks may pretend to prefer stark naked HTML, that doesn't fly with the general public.
IBM decided it needed a refresh in that area. Good for them and good for the graphic design professionals that did the rather impressive work here.