IBM Plex Typeface (2018) | Hacker News Reader

IBM Plex Typeface (2018)

ibm.com

85 pointsTomte75 comments

Can someone please add a (2018) in the title :-)

OK font, pointless website and not a smart choice of name, when we hear Plex the thing that comes to mind is the Plex streaming/home DLNA software [0] we all know.

Well to be honest, the first thing that comes in my mind is the PLEX programming language [1] for Ericsson telephone exchanges, that I know and have used in the past.

[0] https://www.plex.tv/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLEX_(programming_language)

My guess is this a reference to sysplex [0] on mainframe systems, often abbreviated "Plex"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Parallel_Sysplex#Sysplex

I don't think of anything at all when I see "Plex".

My favorite IBM font: the PS/2's VGA font, seen in DOS Mode and BIOSes all throughout the 90s and 2000s.

My preferred implementation: https://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font

Thank you for this. I have missed that font a great deal.

I wonder if anyone hacked up contemporary BIOSes to include it yet.

Unfortunately copyright is still a thing. Not sure if anybody from IBM would notice, but would you want the risk of having a bunch of IBM lawyers showing up on your doorstep?

Yeah, you can almost hear the whooomp of a CRT monitor powering up.

Someone has thoughtfully folded Plex Sans JP in with Plex Mono to make a nice monospace which also handles Japanese pretty well. It's called PlemolJP[1]. I've been using it for one of my projects[2] and have been happy with it.

[1] https://github.com/yuru7/PlemolJP [2] http://lofi.limo

I was puzzled at why IBM would be designing fonts of all things. Then I remembered they started out as a typewriter company and it somehow all just made sense.

Lots of large companies do their own fonts. Not only does it allow them to get a unique branding look, but it can be cheaper than getting and keeping all the necessary licenses for an existing font. Generally the actual font design is farmed out to another company that does that sort of thing for a living.

Wait for the new design of punchcards, spoliers: elliptical holes.

It was a trends a few years ago, every company wanted their own custom font.

It's a nice font though, and they are right, it is distinctly IBM, it looks like IBM.

Then I remembered they started out as a typewriter company

IBM made computing machines for 20 years before it entered the typewriter market.

Believe it or not, IBM's first product was actually a cheese slicer.

I don't believe it.

In particular, IBM was formed by amalgamating various subsidiary companies, so there's no "first product". Even if you focus on the Computing Scale Company, I think their first product was a computing scale and the cheese slicer was later.

That said, the IBM cheese cutter restoration video is very cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8VhNF_0I5c

I recall (there’s a video by the font’s designer somewhere on YouTube) that IBM were paying over $1 million annually to license Helvetica, so one reason would be cost saving.

Fun fact: The typeface Courier (New) we know today from PCs (esp. Windows) is the most enduring of the fonts designed for IBM typewriters that were named after agent nouns related to communication: Adjutant, Advocate, Artisan, Courier, Delegate, Orator, Scribe.

I love Plex, it's my favorite sans-serif monospace typeface.

For serif, the one true style, I'm partial to Go Mono, but my current fascination is DSE Typewriter.

That page says "... we adopted the vertical stroke and right angle of the interior counters, which contrast nicely against the rounded curves of the exterior stroke," and gives the example of the capital 'B' from the IBM logo. But the actual font doesn't do that at all. The 'interior counters' are rounded in the capital 'B' of the font.

It's worded somewhat poorly but you can see what they mean if you look at the terminals of the "a", "t", "j", and "f", for example, which combine a right angle on one side and a curve on the other. They took the idea from the counters, but didn't apply them to counters. (The counters themselves however are a little more vertical than most fonts).

Also available as a Nerd Font!

https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...

I think this is a really nice presentation of a font and its inspiration. Lots of hater comments here. OK. Go straight to the GitHub, that’s fine. But this site shows a lot of the finer details in a nice way. Thumbs up.

IBM had a really good font I liked circa 1991, and I'd love to be able to find it. Does anyone know what this font was? It was a serif font that was (I think) the default terminal font on the RS/6000 at the time. (Or at least it was on the machines we had at the University of Michigan.) The machine I used did not appear to be running XWindows. It looked like a terminal emulator to me. Anyone know what font that was? I think it may have been mono-spaced, but I'm not positive. I was using it for writing code.

Maybe one of these? https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

Oh wow! Thanks for the link! I don't see it on there, but that list is for PC fonts, and this was a Unix workstation. I think it may have actually been antialiased, though I can't say for sure.

Any chance it was an IBM terminal? Looks like it was common for units like the 3151 to be connected to RS/6000 systems: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_3151_terminal.jp...

Doesn’t look like it. That’s a sans-serif font, and the one I’m looking for is a serif font.

Favorite general use fonts for ux design as of 2022 are:

+ Readex Pro

+ Be Vietnam Pro

Favorite if you need many or all languages:

+ IBM Plex

+ Noto Sans (of Google Android fame)

But yeah, IBM Plex is very well done. These are all available on Google Fonts, and specifically designed for readability.

Thank you for the suggestion. Readex is incredibly readable and beautiful at the same time.

Sympathize with all the comments about the horrific web page.

More concretely, is it too much to expect that fonts have ligature support by default? I get it that certain fonts, for historical and aesthetic reasons do not support them.

For me, having ligatures, especially in a fixed width font I'm going to use for coding, is a deal-breaker.

YMMV

I'm confused by your comment. You ask for one thing in one sentence, and then you say the complete opposite in the next.

My point was that IBM Plex, as a recent font, is not bound by historical traditions or practices regarding the use of ligatures in the font.

Sorry for the confusion.

Discussed at the time:

IBM Plex – A new typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701009 - March 2018 (170 comments)

Going to ask a tangential question.

Is there something that happened in the typography world a few years ago that has resulted in what feels like a cambrian explosion of custom typefaces attached to companies?

Ubiquitous WebFont support? Better font tooling? Higher amount of talented typeface consultants? Perhaps all of the above resulting in it costing a lot less to create your own typeface? Would love to know.

Or maybe it's just everyone drowning in VC money and needing places to spend it?

Probably all of the above, plus one: at a certain scale it costs less to have your own font than to license someone else's.

I'm not aware of a VC-backed company that has joined the trend, do you have an example?

It's the cost. Licensing of fonts can be quite expensive. For example, if you are a big multinational and you get a site license for a font for marketing, you're looking at a couple million a year minimum. On the other side, if you hire a firm to design a font, it's a one time payment of a couple hundred thousand, plus you own the rights in perpetuity. It makes a lot of sense to just take the time and make a font that works for you and to which you own the rights when you look at the economics. [https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/#why-go-custom]

It's really hard not use variable fonts now (IBM Plex is not variable). They just make so much more sense and reduce the package size sometimes significantly.

What does variable mean in this context?

Presumably they mean proportional-width rather than monospaced.

Instead of having to download and serve a separate font for each style (bold, light, etc.) it's just one font that interpolates those attributes resulting in much smaller font sizes. Here's a list from google fonts just to see some examples... https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true

Looks like they they do have a variable font for Plex Sans

https://github.com/IBM/plex/tree/master/IBM-Plex-Sans-Variab...

That's a lot of scrolling to github link..

That page is scaling wrong on Firefox for me.

Each section doesn't fit on my screen by itself like I think it intends to.

I recently redesigned my site using the IBM Plex font, if anyone wants to see how it looks in-use: https://eaton-works.com/

All the warm feels of an old IBM Selectric typewriter without the convenient non-proportionality. I passed on this a long time ago.

There's an IBM Plex Mono font too. For me as a coding font it ranks a little behind Iosevka, but it's pretty good.

That’s the most egregious use of red vs. blue contrast ever, and there have been plenty of contenders. Right out the gate! Haha

IBM plex mono is my IDE font of choice

What a load of old claptrap.

Just show me some samples.

There are thousands of sites where you can just see samples. If you arrived at this site, you've already seen them.

Fairy snuff, I'm happy to get a typeface explainer but this may as well be spooned prunes. https://youtu.be/y6Gma6iNhxU

As a reminder, Iosevka exists and does it better.

You'd think they're introducing general purpose AI, but no, it's just a font.

That page hurts my eyes. Not the font, the colors and motions. I do not understand why we design pages like this anymore. Does anyone like that style?

Sorry to be a Negative Nelly. I'm sure some devs worked hard on that sigh. I do like the typeface itself.

Less informative/marketing/design, just the downloads: https://github.com/IBM/plex

As this seems to be old news, was there a reason why you posted it?

Edit: (2018) in the title would be in order.

I just found it. On a closer look, the current release is from 2021.

100% agree. I can't stand pages like this. It adds nothing but jankiness and confusion.

I'm with ya. I'm a fan of the font (been using monospaced off and on for years)

The page design trend though feels user hostile. No, you can't scroll directly to the information. Your eyes must see all this JavaScript glory

Hah same reception as four years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701009

But really, it's jarring, jumpy, doesn't feel consistent (why are some transitions done by scrolling and others by clicking, when they look the same?), choppy, unnecessarily interactive, it's simply awful. There are good interactive content experiences on the web, this isn't one of them.

Compare with: "The Pianist and the Lobster" in the NYT.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/21/opinion/edito...

This is a more simple place to get a sample of the typeface: https://beautifulwebtype.com/ibm-plex-sans/

BWT is so good. I dare say it’s the best web typography site I’ve found.

And why force me to watch an animation covering the screen with blue and white bars? And, they disable my ability to scroll until it's done. Don't they realize people today have no patience for such things?

It's the opposite. This page is specifically made for people who do have time to spare. You don't go to IBM.com to find your next font -- you go to Google fonts or any font "buffets" where you can preview hundreds/thousands of fonts and pick the right one.

If you landed on this site, it's because you found IBM Plex elsewhere and decided to take some time to find out more about it. And IBM knows you have a choice of thousands of fonts, so it purposely wants to go overboard on the presentation, show you how much thought went into these fonts, and hopefully even make you a bit nostalgic or emotional.

It's also a typography presentation, anyone viewing it on mobile isn't really the target audience anyway.

You're right, I do sense that this was made for designers first. It's more of a portfolio demo than a font demo. The bulk of the page is graphics rather than in-depth text samples.

That being said, I still think its a poor all-around presentation.

A graphic designer probably wanted to beef up their resume/portfolio. For a webpage about a font it's a little much.

You're missing the whole point of the page.

I had the same thought. It only recently hit me how much of the world around me is sneakily driven by individuals wanting to strengthen their resume.

I had underestimated how often the frameworks/languages chosen was influenced by a developer simply wanting to built up skills in that area, rather than it being the best tool for the job.

But, interestingly enough, it seems to me that this can often lead to great results! The developer is motivated both to prove that their decision could solve the problem and also to learn the technology for reasons beyond that project alone.

It seems that might be what’s going on here: the graphic designer is flexing, and a page about a font is trending on HN.

This page matches the nature of this font. It's OK in this context

Wow I thought you were exaggerating. That is one awful page. It feels so... hostile.

I love it. The internet would be a boring place if it weren’t for “pages” like this. We design pages like this because unique, one-of-a-kind creations matter.

For the target audience, who think about typefaces more critically, there is value in a deep dive into the unique characteristics of this typeface. The why, the how. The entire site experience expresses and reinforces these ideas.

There's also the site for Jony Ive's design collective LoveFrom[0]. And the inevitable dumping on by HN[1].

[0]https://www.lovefrom.com/

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861601

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

They also tend to get upvoted to the top, where they choke out interesting conversation. That's where this one was before I marked it off-topic.

The upvotes are the greater problem, but it's harder to do anything about that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks dang! I regularly see these types of comments on articles linking to Twitter, but those tend to remain at or near the top, from what I remember at least.

> That page hurts my eyes. Not the font, the colors and motions. I do not understand why we design pages like this anymore. Does anyone like that style?

If I were to guess, whoever designed the page was consciously riffing off of Paul Rand's (designer of the IBM logos that this typeface is based on) graphic work, particularly from the late 70s to early 90s:

https://www.paulrand.design/work/IBM.html

Except that the colors in particular which were a bold choice in print, are positively eye-watering on modern screens.

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