IBM Plex is an open source typeface superfamily conceptually designed and developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday to reflect the design principles of IBM and to be used for all brand material across the company internationally. Plex replaces

Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

as the IBM corporate typeface after more than fifty years, freeing the company from extensive license payments in the process. Version 1.0 of the font family had four typefaces, each with 8 weights (Thin, Extra Light, Light, Regular, Text, Medium, Semi-bold, Bold) and true italics to complement them. * IBM Plex Sans – A

grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

sans-serif typeface with a design that was inspired by

Franklin Gothic Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head desi ...

. Other sans-serif classifications were rejected on the basis of being too soft (

humanist Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "human ...

), inefficient ( geometric) and overly perfected (

Neo-grotesque In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called " serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than se ...

). Some of Franklin Gothic's features such as the angled terminals, a double-storey g and a horizontal line at the baseline of the 1 are used in IBM Plex Sans. On 7 April 2019, IBM Plex Sans Variable, a

variable Variable may refer to: * Variable (computer science), a symbolic name associated with a value and whose associated value may be changed * Variable (mathematics), a symbol that represents a quantity in a mathematical expression, as used in many ...

counterpart to IBM Plex Sans was released. * IBM Plex Sans Condensed – A condensed variant of IBM Plex Sans. * IBM Plex Mono – A

monospaced A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

typeface based on IBM Plex Sans. The italic design was inspired by the Italic 12 typeface used on the

IBM Selectric typewriter The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on 31 July 1961. Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a typical typewriter of the peri ...

; this is particularly evident with the italicised ''i'', ''j'', ''t'' and ''x'' letters. * IBM Plex Serif – A transitional serif typeface with a design that was inspired by

Bodoni Bodoni is the name given to the serif typefaces first designed by Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) in the late eighteenth century and frequently revived since. Bodoni's typefaces are classified as Didone or modern. Bodoni followed the ideas o ...

and

Janson Janson is the name given to a set of old-style serif typefaces from the Dutch Baroque period, and modern revivals from the twentieth century. Janson is a crisp, relatively high-contrast serif design, most popular for body text. Janson is based ...

. Other serif classifications were rejected for being too humanist and outdated (old-style) and too clunky and unrefined for long text (

slab-serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

). Some of Bodoni's features such as ball terminals and rectangular serifs are used in IBM Plex Serif.

Unicode coverage

As of version 1.0 the IBM Plex typefaces support over 100 languages with most that use the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

alphabet (including

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

), as well as Cyrillic (except in IBM Plex Sans Condensed). In version 3.0 of IBM Plex Sans, support for monotonic Greek was added. For other writing systems separate fonts were made without italics: * IBM Plex Sans Hebrew – Adding support for the

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

writing system. * IBM Plex Sans Thai – Adding support for the informal loopless Thai script, released on 15 October 2018. * IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped – Adding support for the formal looped Thai script, on 5 April 2019. * IBM Plex Sans Devanagari – Added support for the

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

writing system, released on 14 December 2018. * IBM Plex Sans Arabic – Added support for

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

script, released on 13 March 2019. * IBM Plex Sans Korean – Added support for the

Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...

alphabet, released on 8 June 2020. *IBM Plex Sans Japanese – Added support for

Japanese writing system The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese ...

, released on 24 July 2021. In addition, both Mike Abbink and Bold Monday have confirmed to be working on support for CJK,

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

and

Kannada Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...

. There is also support for common mathematical and currency symbols (including Bitcoin (₿) #U+20BF which was ratified into Unicode in 2017) as well as ligatures such as fi and fl, along with stylistic alternates for a, g and 0. There are a few unreleased symbols for IBM Plex Sans Condensed, IBM Plex Mono and IBM Plex Serif such as the generic currency sign (¤),

prime symbol The prime symbol , double prime symbol , triple prime symbol , and quadruple prime symbol are used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, science, linguistics and music. Although the characters differ little in appearance fr ...

(′) and double prime symbol (″). In addition Mike Abbink has confirmed support for the

Mathematical Operators Mathematical Operators is a Unicode block containing characters for mathematical, logical, and set notation. Notably absent are the plus sign (+), greater than sign (>) and less than sign (<), due to them already appearing in the Basi ...

block and support for the symbols used in the APL programming language in 2019. The

FCC The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdictio ...

#EFCC and

CE marking On commercial products, the letters CE (as the logo ) mean that the manufacturer or importer affirms the good's conformity with European health, safety, and environmental protection standards. It is not a quality indicator or a certificatio ...

#ECE0 logos are encoded as glyphs within the

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...

. Prior to version 1.0, five IBM logos (solid and 8-bar logos, and the I-Bee-M logo) #EBE1 to #EBE7 were also encoded as glyphs.

Licensing

IBM has licensed the font files only under the SIL Open Font License (SIL OFL). Between 9 August 2018 and 21 August 2018, the fonts were also dual-licensed under the Apache License. This dual-licensing arrangement was rescinded due to concerns that the Apache License is unsuitable for fonts. The SIL OFL license is free and open-source, but building the fonts from source requires FontLab Studio, which is proprietary software. Bold Monday also provide web development code in CSS, SCSS and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

that is related to the fonts under the Apache License. IBM Plex's name is reserved, as allowed by the SIL OFL, and trademarked as of December 2017.

References

External links

GitHub page

Official site

IBM Plex Sans
on

Google Fonts Google Fonts (formerly known as Google Web Fonts) is a computer font and web font service owned by Google. This includes free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs for using the fonts v ...

IBM Plex Sans Condensed
on

IBM Plex Mono
on

IBM Plex Serif
on

{{Monospaced fonts Plex Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2017 Unified serif and sans-serif typeface families Corporate typefaces Open-source typefaces Transitional serif typefaces Grotesque sans-serif typefaces Monospaced typefaces Thai typefaces

Unicode coverage

Licensing

See also

References

External links