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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.
Font and typography can play a big role in brand recognition, which is arguably what the creative director of brand experience is all about (and is important even for larger companies that are already well known). Printed material from Shell or Ikea is instantly recognizable... Ikea ran an ad about how the price tag is the first thing they design, and that could be taken literally: companies like that spend a lot of time on typography, and especially the way prices are presented receives a lot of attention. This is the stuff that can position your company as "budget", "premium", "good value for money", or position it in one or more target demographics.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Thanks to MacOS it's become associated with crap font rendering. It wasn't until they got high resolution displays to negate the crap anti-aliasing that a print font really worked on screen.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't believe the old lie about there not being such a thing as bad publicity. What this tells me as an engineer is that IBM places lower priority on function than on form and what this tells me as an investor is that IBM's C-suite is wasting its time on logos instead of running the company.