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Comment by Norther | Hacker News Reader

While interesting, is this really necessary? Call me skeptical, but value add = negligible, justification for an entire department to spend several months+ working = likely.

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.

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> IBM though, less so?

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.

You can have a consistent design language without creating your own font though.

Yeah, I think web sites that insist on having their own fonts are being a bit narcissistic. The user should have the fonts that are pleasing to their eyes installed and their browser should use them. Web sites insisting they know better have too many people doing design. Go ahead and cut that cost, we won't notice.

No, I highly disagree. There's nothing narcissistic about wanting to choose the fonts for your site.

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 is a large company (380K headcount) with a design staff. They produce A LOT of textual material for clients that are paying serious piles of money.

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.

stark naked html doesn't necessarily imply ugly default styles. think of it as attempting to achieve perfection in fashion through doing as much as possible with as little as possible.

IBM's last corporate typeface was a slightly modified version of Helvetica, which wasn't particularly distinctive and didn't see much adoption internally.

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/

Airports comission their own fonts and so do cities, car manufacturers and banks. Typically they are proprietary and might even have an exclusive license because they are considered to be part of the corporate identity.

I think when you're as big as IBM, you also need to have random people doing random stuff here and there, as who knows when you'd need something special unexpectedly or when you might suddenly have a hot product unexpectedly. As well, it's helpful to have random teams working on silly projects or even toys if only to keep people's minds fresh and flexible. If we're only always thinking about the value add, won't we become like the stock market analysts that only care about share price and end up giving advice only focused on the short-term? Of course too much waste is too much. But what's a small project here and there, especially if there are zero legal issues in a place like IBM where so much stuff has an "only built here" sentiment; I can't for the life of me imagine why IBM insisted on using Lotus Notes when I was there. I knew very few people who liked it.

There's this wonderful book, "Corporate Culture & Performance" by John P. Kotter - the biggest take-away for me was that companies under stress to perform will generally cargo-cult their behavior from successful times.

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.

I think it’s more like the design equivalent of open source software. It’s meant for internal use but then “open sourced”, there may be a trend, I’m not sure.

https://atlassian.design

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