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IBM's Quest To Design The 'New Helvetica' (fastcodesign.com)
IBM released its new bespoke typeface IBM Plex in beta this week. The company is hoping that the new typeface would become just as iconic as Helvetica in the years to come. From a Fast Co Design story: "When I came to IBM, it was a big discussion: Why does IBM not have a bespoke typeface? Why are we still clinging on to Helvetica?" Mike Abbink, the typeface's designer and IBM's executive creative director of brand experience and design said. To uncover what the typeface should express, Abbink and his team took a deep dive into IBM's archives. They were especially interested in the company's history in the postwar years, when its design-led business strategy first took shape and the legendary practitioner Paul Rand, who defined design as a system of relationships, created its famous eight-bar logo. In Rand's logo, Abbink and his team saw a contrast between hard edges -- the engineered, rational, and mechanical -- and curves -- the softer more humanistic elements. It's a reflection of the man-and-machine relationship that runs through the company's history -- a dynamic that is reflected in the final form of IBM Plex. The Plex family includes a sans serif, serif, and monospace versions. The designers also created a rigorous style guide that's akin to a digital standards manual and includes a type scale, which plays into responsive displays; eight different weights (a nod to how the IBM logo is composed of eight horizontally stacked bars); and usage guidelines, which dive into everything from information hierarchies to color and ragging. All together, it's easy to see Plex as a gentler, friendlier, more casual Helvetica for a broad range of uses both digital and print-based.
Helvetica was created in 1957.
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Helvetica has been around since 1957, and its use by Apple is comparatively minor. It was only Mac OS X's system font for one year. Helvetica is hugely influential and widely well-regarded, while Arial is basically just a generic knockoff.
I know it's /. and people don't read the summary, but
is a big hint, which is easily confirmed: Helvetica is what IBM currently uses as its primary typeface. Comparing to anything else would therefore make less sense.
Helvetica has been around since 1957, and its use by Apple is comparatively minor. It was only Mac OS X's system font for one year. Helvetica is hugely influential and widely well-regarded, while Arial is basically just a generic knockoff.
Not only that, there has even been a documentary about Helvetica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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there are three basic types of fonts, Sans, Serif, and monospace
Completely wrong.
Sans Serif and Serif just describe either the absence or presence of lines extending from the bottom of letters. Even these have sub categories, like "Slab Serif". Neither of these have anything to do with a font is monospace or not. For example, "Courier New" is one of my personal favourite fonts, and is both monospace and serif. These are just 2 possible attributes (since "sans serif" just means not containing serifs) of a font. Many font families have both serif and sans serif versions, and some even have monospace versions, which just means each character takes up a fixed amount of width, NOT meaning that the span of the left side to the right side of each glyph is a fixed length, whitespace counts. So you can make ANY font monospace just by whitespace padding all representations of glyphs to match the largest in the set.
Thus, being toggelable attributes, the true difference between any font is absolutely everything else.
Helvetica has a history that predates Apple's adoption by what amounts to half a century, and has a reach into our lives that is so deep we are not aware of it. That's how good it is. Your association of Helvetica with Apple's products suggests that you aren't looking around enough with a critical eye. There's a beautiful movie about Helvetica, made in 2007. Here's a link to the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The trailer includes cool snapshots of typical uses of Helvetica from around NYC. It includes things like the signs in the subways, many company logos, tons and tons of advertising, Helvetica is everywhere. And the movie is well worth watching for typography geeks and normal people, alike.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
What about Courier? IBM owned that font... It's also known as "IBM Courier." They owned the copyright to that font and released it decades ago.
But IBM is late to the party on that by about 30 years.
I can't tell if you're an idiot or a bad troll, but I'm leaning toward the former.
I'm pretty sure IBM was putting text on paper and displays long before any of those other companies even existed.
Arial is a cheap knock off of Helvetica, it was chosen specifically because if you're not that interested in fonts it looks almost identical. MS Sans was intended to be much the same thing before Arial became standard.
Helvetica isn't associated with Apple, but Adobe, who made it one of the standard fonts shipped with PostScript. As a result all desktop publishing packages included Helvetica, and that was followed by most operating systems adopting it, or a clone, when they moved over to outline fonts in the late 1980s.
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