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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.
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 THEY DO NOT BECOME OUTDATED.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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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...
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.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.