IBM Plex

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 as the IBM corporate typeface after more than fifty years in 2017, freeing the company from extensive license payments in the process.[1]

Version 1.0 of the font family had four typefaces, each with eight weights (Thin, Extra Light, Light, Regular, Text, Medium, Semi-bold, Bold) and true italics to complement them.[2]

• IBM Plex Sans – A grotesque sans-serif typeface with a design that was inspired by Franklin Gothic. Other sans-serif classifications were rejected on the basis of being too soft (humanist), inefficient (geometric) and overly perfected (neo-grotesque). 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 counterpart to IBM Plex Sans was released.
• IBM Plex Sans Condensed – A condensed variant of IBM Plex Sans.
• IBM Plex Mono – A monospaced typeface based on IBM Plex Sans. The italic design was inspired by the Italic 12 typeface used on the IBM Selectric typewriter; this is particularly evident with the italicised were also encoded as glyphs.

Licensing

IBM has licensed the font files only under the SIL Open Font License (SIL OFL).[16] 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 This dual-licensing arrangement was rescinded due to concerns that the Apache License is unsuitable for fonts.[17] The SIL OFL license is free and open-source, but building the fonts from source requires FontLab Studio, which is proprietary software.[18]

Bold Monday also provide web development code in CSS, SCSS and JavaScript that is related to the fonts under the Apache License. Font packages in npm are also available.[19]

IBM Plex's name is reserved, as allowed by the SIL OFL, and trademarked as of December 2017.[20][21]

See also

• Open-source Unicode typefaces
• Cantarell, the default typeface in past versions of GNOME
• Droid (typeface), the default fonts for first versions of Android
• Noto fonts, the default fonts for newer versions of Android
• Open Sans, another font based on Droid Sans
• Roboto, the default fonts for newer versions of Android
• National Fonts, free and open-source Thai fonts
• PT Fonts, free and open-source fonts from Russia
• STIX Fonts project, typefaces intended to serve the scientific and engineering community

External links

• GitHub page
• Official site
• IBM Plex Sans on Google Fonts
• IBM Plex Sans Condensed on Google Fonts
• IBM Plex Mono on Google Fonts
• IBM Plex Serif on Google Fonts