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.

Comments

Stupid

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Re:Stupid

[MBGMorden]

I have to agree. Too many people get wrapped up in the idea that "old is bad - change is a necessity". The world isn't that simplistic.

Fonts and typefaces are not technology. THEY DO NOT BECOME OUTDATED. If Helvetica works, then it works. There's no need to create busy work to replace it.

Re:Stupid

[DontBeAMoran]

It's not about Helvetica working or not working.

Apple has its fonts. Microsoft has its fonts. Adobe has its fonts. It's about IBM having it's own font, too.

Re:Stupid

[Hognoxious]

And distracting from the important stuff like what colour to paint the bikesheds.

Re:Stupid

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Stupid

[OrangeTide]

You have no idea what you are talking about.

As solid of a rebuttal as I've seen. But typefaces are centuries old technology. It's a problem that has been solved and well studies. The problems that a typeface solves are not problems that change rapidly. A 19th century typeface can be considered quite readable and elegant to our modern eyes, and why shouldn't it, the 19th century is still well in the modern era.

If IBM wants to spend their money to enhance our artistic world

An astounding point of view on the craft of technical writing. And I strongly disagree that manuals are art. The expression of facts is philosophically different than artistic expression and has a different value to society at large.

It is none of your business

This is a web forum and we've established that this is the topic of conversation. Everyone gets to weigh in and play at armchair graphics designer.

Re:Stupid

[RightwingNutjob]

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.

Re:Stupid

[Martin Blank]

But typefaces are centuries old technology. It's a problem that has been solved and well studies. The problems that a typeface solves are not problems that change rapidly. A 19th century typeface can be considered quite readable and elegant to our modern eyes, and why shouldn't it, the 19th century is still well in the modern era.

That's not as true as you think. The readability and legibility (two distinct attributes) of a font have many factors, and they haven't been studied to the degree that one might expect. What studies have been done are often decidedly mixed or even contradictory, but there does seem to be some consensus that the medium is one of the factors. For print, serif fonts like Times New Roman offer higher readability and legibility on average, while sans serif fonts are better for computer displays. However, some fonts that work well on CRTs can be hard to read on LCDs, and vice versa. This was a major factor behind the design of Calibri, which was built for LCDs, and I think also a factor in the design of the Liberation font family that is the default for Libre Office.

While classic fonts (Arial, Helvetica, and Times New Roman) remain the go-to for many people (and most others just settle for whatever is the default in their word processor), there's still a lot of room for experimentation and expansion. Recent work on fonts for dyslexics has produced some interesting results, and I think they sometimes make documents easier to read, though the look can become tiring. That work may eventually find its way into mainstream fonts and make text in general easier to read for a wider set of the population, and it wouldn't happen if the issues surrounding readability and legibility of typefaces were, as you say, solved.

Re:What about Arial

[PopeRatzo]

Helvetica, a font closely associated with the Mac OS.

Helvetica was created in 1957.

Re:What about Arial

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about Arial

[pjt33]

I know it's /. and people don't read the summary, but

Why are we still clinging on to Helvetica?

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.

Re:What about Arial

[OzPeter]

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/...

Re:Helvetica is just another "Sans" type font

[barbariccow]

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.

Re:What about Arial

[pz]

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.

What about Courier?

[barbariccow]

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.

Re:What about Arial

[squiggleslash]

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.