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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.
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?
This should tell you all you need to know about whether the "creative director of brand experience and design" adds any value to the company.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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 only thing worse than artists are those who critique them.
So deep and fascinating.
Helvetica was created in 1957.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Absolutely. Every distinction beyond those 3 is just pretentious fluff. That's why I do *everything* in Comic Sans. /s
Because a significant aspect of legibility is familiarity. There's a reason almost all "if you touch this you'll die" signs are typeset in Helvetica, this is also why Germany spent a significant portion of the last century clinging onto Blackletter.
Well, obviously the designers needed work, so they made some. Hey, why not create a font, but three fonts, and a shit-ton of paperwork to go with them. Plus standards on how they should be used, so there will be plenty of enforcement make-work in years to come.
You want to know why, a lot of times, companies change shit for no reason? So that the designers will have something to design, and far more importantly, have something on their resumes they can show off. So many products that work just fine get trashed this way, millions of users are harmed, just so a handful of designers can move on to that next great thing.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Helvetica was created in 1957.
And . . . ?
The two statements are not contradictory or mutually exclusive.
>> Why does IBM not have a bespoke typeface? Why are we still clinging on to Helvetica?
It's a FREE and OPEN font. (Remember when IBM tried pitching open source stuff?)
And the crap IBM shovels won't smell any sweeter if it looks a little different.
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.
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,
I see what you did there.
Every end has half a stick.
But fastcodesign.com just proved don't know jack shit about how the web works.
The image "4-ibms-quest-to-make-a-new-helvetica" should be in PNG format, not JPEG.
Idiots.
#DeleteFacebook
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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I find it amusing that IBM, a company with a track record of working with Microsoft and Dos and other non-MAC OS would compare their new font to Helvetica, a font closely associated with the Mac OS. Why they wouldn't say "IBM Plex is the new Arial" is beyond me, especially since those two fonts are so similar.
I suspect the designer is an fanatical Mac user. After downloading the font it has multiple directories. Among those mac vs pc.. Only mac users are under the delusion that macs are not PCs, and secondly... The "mac" fonts were OTF and the "pc" fonts TTF.... yeah.. those working on that are pretty deluded, and if it is designed on macs the hinting is probably also completely fucked, though with my hidpi screen I can't tell bad hinting anymore.
So? GP isn't wrong. Helvetica was the default font for Mac OS for many years. I certainly associate the two. The fact that Apple didn't create Helvetica doesn't mean they're not associated.
Wait... aren't you critiquing both artists, and the ones who critique them, and the ones who critique the ones that critique them?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Just a guess here, but IBM has probably been using Helvetica long before the Apple Macintosh was created.
Typefaces were in place long before IBM, Apple, Microsoft entered the scene. I too wonder why the article refers to IBM creating a new "Helvetica", calling it IBM Plex, and including serif, sans-serif, and monotype. My main complaint is that there is essentially no such thing as a serif Helvetica, so how can there be a new IBM Plex that is serif? Same is true of monotype. And we should have no illusions about IBM Plex replacing Helvetica. Nothing is EVER going to replace Helvetica. The article summary would be much clearer if it never even used the word. (As for Mac's being associated with Helvetica, well, they paid Linotype for the name, along with Xerox and Adobe, so that the font would be included in Postscript). As for today, whether it is called Helvetica or Arial or FreeSans, it's basically the standard, basic sans serif font. Helvetica is Kleenex. Arial is facial tissue. Both will catch your snot.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
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.
obviously a minor in the eyes of the law, or you'd have more than the initials.
And it looks IBM-ish to me, though I couldn't say why, maybe it looks like something that OS2 would have scrolled up in that creepy smooth way that it did. I think they should have used the typeface from the 3270 terminal though - that is what I most associate with IBM.
Nullius in verba
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.
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
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.
The statement should have read: Helvetica, a font closely associated with the Mac OS by people outside of the graphics design industry, including Apple's own fans.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Tell the IBM PHB's that you switched to Swiss 721.
(joke for the graphic designers out there).
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Soft lines on the outside edge, so I guess they intend it to always show up blurry. No thanks.
IBM: Our revenues have dropped from $110 billion to $80 billion over the past five years. Does anyone have any ideas?
Abbink: How about a bespoke typeface?
The default font for MacOS is called "San Francisco". Apparently Mac is so closely associated with Helvetica that they decided to change the name before using it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ok, I'll bite..I'm stupid Someone explain to me what "bespoke typeface" means.
Sent from my TARDIS
All the people that worked with those other companies and software no longer work at IBM. They have the institutional memory of a gnat.
Both MacOS and Windows have been able to use both OTF and TTF for many years. Yes, that may have been where they both became mainstream, but they're not exclusive to the OSes any more.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
> there are three basic types of fonts, Sans, Serif, and monospace,
Incorrect.
There are at least 2 properties of typefaces.
* Serif along with the opposite Sans Serif, and
* Proportional along with the opposite Non-proportional aka monospaced
You are conflating proportionality with serifs. Traditionally, monospaced typefaces are Sans Serif, but that is NOT a hard rule.
For example, you can have:
* monospaced Serif typefaces -- e.g. Courier New (which look like crap on electronic displays, but look good in print)
and
* monospaced Sans serif typefaces. -- e.g. Inconsolata, Source Code Pro (which look great on electronic displays, but look OK in print.)
The easiest way to tell if a font is serif or not is to look at the "S" or "s".
Ok, now I get why IBM has been going straight downhill. They weren't spending nearly enough time on a new font.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
That said, let's note that, for a corporation as large as IBM, the costs of having such a design team develop is pretty minor. Even so, there has to be some form of performance metric the managers and higher ups use to measure the value to the company the design team and their output provide. Which leads me to my questions:
If you're a high level design exec, how do you determine that a change is needed? Once you've come up with a new logo, typeface, letterheads and so on, how do you measure its effectiveness at expressing the companies philosophy/business strategy? I've often felt that there is too much effort being put into such things. You get a creative type to create a logo, choose a typeface that suits your needs and move on. Yet these creative folk (most of whom are pretty smart within their field) see effects on the viewer, see meaning in little details that frankly eludes me. It's like in the art world, where artists and intellectuals see nuances and levels of meaning in a work that the vast majority of people just don't notice or understand. At it's most extreme, that leads to things like modern art, performance art and so on. If a big corporation chooses a new look, given that subtleties are going to be lost on the majority of viewers, how can they be sure it's not only working, but working well enough to justify the man hours that went into crafting it?
I'd love to hear from the artists, industrial designers and so on about this.
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There, I said it.
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.
It wasn't the antialiasing that was bad, it was just mediocre, it was the lack of hinting. It makes thing look more like print... If you squint, but makes the text even when you are not squinting as clear as if you were.
Both MacOS and Windows have been able to use both OTF and TTF for many years. Yes, that may have been where they both became mainstream, but they're not exclusive to the OSes any more.
Exactly, TrueType started on macOS, while OpenType was on Windows first, but both standards were designed by both companies.
Some 13 years ago, OS/2 came with its own custom font, Warp Sans. Granted, it was a bitmapped font and only came in (IIRC) 11pt, but I'm pretty sure it qualified as an "IBM font".
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Helvetica is one short of the embodyment of god in Fonts. The replacement for it has long since been built and is called Futura. 99% of things we read in the western world goes back to these fonts and their anchestors. I seriously doubt they can find and establish something this iconic.
But I'm curious anyway. IBM has money to burn and chances are their font doesn't suck. What I've seen so far looks ok to me, that much I can say. A replacement for Futura or Helvetica? Nope. Not even close.
But a neat font? Yeah, probably.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Arial is a large step down. A sad and sorry Helvetica rippoff, and it shows at every corner. Designers and Typographists never use it. And when they are forced to, they feel dirty afterwards. I'm not exaggerating.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Helvetica Neue used to be the New Helvetica. Now Helvetica is the New Helvetica.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Berthold City. Those unmistakeable square-cornered letters used for the IBM logo, all the 70xx, 360, 370 manuals and numerous other IBM publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
All these comments, and not a single person pointed out the obvious: where is this font? Where are the side-by-side images showing some popular fonts next to this new IBM offering. "The quick brown fox, etc..." Event watched the video, but it is essentially useless. No real explanation as to why this is necessary over Helvetica, how crisper/softer/something it will be, easier to read, less ink, higher contrast, ...anything?
Helvetica was the default font for Mac OS for many years. I certainly associate the two.
Apple Garamond is of course the font which represents classic Apple... unless you count Chicago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Helvetica is a sans serif, proportional font.
I know it since 30 years, it never needed anti aliasing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Everybody in this decades is associating 'PC' with Windows.
If you can not deal with that you have a mental problem.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There are FOUR basic fonts, sans, serif, mono and comic sans. (The later is for websites).
Right, there are four basic fonts, sans, serif, mono, comic sans and OMG Ponies...FIVE basic fonts. I'll start again.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It does, Inconsolata-g is better -- it fixes the "one" and lower case "L" glyph from looking to similar.
You can find it and other good recommendations here:
https://www.slant.co/topics/67...
* Andale Mono
* Anonymous Pro
* Consolas
* Deja Vu Sans Mon
* Droid Sans Mono
* Envy Code R
* Fira Code
* Hack
* Inconsolata-g
* Input
* Liberation Mono
* Lucida Console
* M+ 1m
* Menlo
* Meslo LG
* Monaco
* PT Mono
* Proggy Clean
* Source Code Pro
* Ubuntu Mono
Why wouldn't they want to stick with this? https://urban-fonts.s3.amazona...
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.
Not exactly. First, while Arial is a cheap knock-off of Helvetica, in the sense of being developed specifically to be a cheaper alternative, it was largely based on Monotype Grotesque, which predates Helvetica by three decades. Helvetica, despite its inflated reputation as some kind of wonder-face, is a pretty basic humanist grotesque. It was hardly groundbreaking; it was just a bit nicer than its competitors.
And Arial wasn't designed to be mistaken for Helvetica, but to be substituted for it. The letterforms have the same metrics so that a document intended to be printed in Helvetica can be printed in Arial without changing the layout.
The point, of course, was to avoid paying for a Helvetica license. Kind of like, oh, OpenOffice. Or OpenJDK. Or aftermarket car parts. Or any of a zillion other cheaper-substitute technologies.