But really, it's jarring, jumpy, doesn't feel consistent (why are some transitions done by scrolling and others by clicking, when they look the same?), choppy, unnecessarily interactive, it's simply awful. There are good interactive content experiences on the web, this isn't one of them.
Compare with: "The Pianist and the Lobster" in the NYT.
And why force me to watch an animation covering the screen with blue and white bars? And, they disable my ability to scroll until it's done. Don't they realize people today have no patience for such things?
It's the opposite. This page is specifically made for people who do have time to spare. You don't go to IBM.com to find your next font -- you go to Google fonts or any font "buffets" where you can preview hundreds/thousands of fonts and pick the right one.
If you landed on this site, it's because you found IBM Plex elsewhere and decided to take some time to find out more about it. And IBM knows you have a choice of thousands of fonts, so it purposely wants to go overboard on the presentation, show you how much thought went into these fonts, and hopefully even make you a bit nostalgic or emotional.
It's also a typography presentation, anyone viewing it on mobile isn't really the target audience anyway.
You're right, I do sense that this was made for designers first. It's more of a portfolio demo than a font demo. The bulk of the page is graphics rather than in-depth text samples.
That being said, I still think its a poor all-around presentation.
I had the same thought. It only recently hit me how much of the world around me is sneakily driven by individuals wanting to strengthen their resume.
I had underestimated how often the frameworks/languages chosen was influenced by a developer simply wanting to built up skills in that area, rather than it being the best tool for the job.
But, interestingly enough, it seems to me that this can often lead to great results! The developer is motivated both to prove that their decision could solve the problem and also to learn the technology for reasons beyond that project alone.
It seems that might be what’s going on here: the graphic designer is flexing, and a page about a font is trending on HN.
I love it. The internet would be a boring place if it weren’t for “pages” like this. We design pages like this because unique, one-of-a-kind creations matter.
For the target audience, who think about typefaces more critically, there is value in a deep dive into the unique characteristics of this typeface. The why, the how. The entire site experience expresses and reinforces these ideas.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
They also tend to get upvoted to the top, where they choke out interesting conversation. That's where this one was before I marked it off-topic.
The upvotes are the greater problem, but it's harder to do anything about that.
Thanks dang! I regularly see these types of comments on articles linking to Twitter, but those tend to remain at or near the top, from what I remember at least.
> That page hurts my eyes. Not the font, the colors and motions. I do not understand why we design pages like this anymore. Does anyone like that style?
If I were to guess, whoever designed the page was consciously riffing off of Paul Rand's (designer of the IBM logos that this typeface is based on) graphic work, particularly from the late 70s to early 90s:
I was puzzled at why IBM would be designing fonts of all things. Then I remembered they started out as a typewriter company and it somehow all just made sense.
Lots of large companies do their own fonts. Not only does it allow them to get a unique branding look, but it can be cheaper than getting and keeping all the necessary licenses for an existing font. Generally the actual font design is farmed out to another company that does that sort of thing for a living.
In particular, IBM was formed by amalgamating various subsidiary companies, so there's no "first product". Even if you focus on the Computing Scale Company, I think their first product was a computing scale and the cheese slicer was later.
I recall (there’s a video by the font’s designer somewhere on YouTube) that IBM were paying over $1 million annually to license Helvetica, so one reason would be cost saving.
Fun fact: The typeface Courier (New) we know today from PCs (esp. Windows) is the most enduring of the fonts designed for IBM typewriters that were named after agent nouns related to communication: Adjutant, Advocate, Artisan, Courier, Delegate, Orator, Scribe.
Sympathize with all the comments about the horrific web page.
More concretely, is it too much to expect that fonts have ligature support by default? I get it that certain fonts, for historical and aesthetic reasons do not support them.
For me, having ligatures, especially in a fixed width font I'm going to use for coding, is a deal-breaker.
OK font, pointless website and not a smart choice of name, when we hear Plex the thing that comes to mind is the Plex streaming/home DLNA software [0] we all know.
Well to be honest, the first thing that comes in my mind is the PLEX programming language [1] for Ericsson telephone exchanges, that I know and have used in the past.
It's really hard not use variable fonts now (IBM Plex is not variable). They just make so much more sense and reduce the package size sometimes significantly.
Instead of having to download and serve a separate font for each style (bold, light, etc.) it's just one font that interpolates those attributes resulting in much smaller font sizes. Here's a list from google fonts just to see some examples... https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true
Unfortunately copyright is still a thing. Not sure if anybody from IBM would notice, but would you want the risk of having a bunch of IBM lawyers showing up on your doorstep?
Someone has thoughtfully folded Plex Sans JP in with Plex Mono to make a nice monospace which also handles Japanese pretty well. It's called PlemolJP[1]. I've been using it for one of my projects[2] and have been happy with it.
IBM had a really good font I liked circa 1991, and I'd love to be able to find it. Does anyone know what this font was? It was a serif font that was (I think) the default terminal font on the RS/6000 at the time. (Or at least it was on the machines we had at the University of Michigan.) The machine I used did not appear to be running XWindows. It looked like a terminal emulator to me. Anyone know what font that was? I think it may have been mono-spaced, but I'm not positive. I was using it for writing code.
Oh wow! Thanks for the link! I don't see it on there, but that list is for PC fonts, and this was a Unix workstation. I think it may have actually been antialiased, though I can't say for sure.
That page says "... we adopted the vertical stroke and right angle of the interior counters, which contrast nicely against the rounded curves of the exterior stroke," and gives the example of the capital 'B' from the IBM logo. But the actual font doesn't do that at all. The 'interior counters' are rounded in the capital 'B' of the font.
It's worded somewhat poorly but you can see what they mean if you look at the terminals of the "a", "t", "j", and "f", for example, which combine a right angle on one side and a curve on the other. They took the idea from the counters, but didn't apply them to counters. (The counters themselves however are a little more vertical than most fonts).
Is there something that happened in the typography world a few years ago that has resulted in what feels like a cambrian explosion of custom typefaces attached to companies?
Ubiquitous WebFont support? Better font tooling? Higher amount of talented typeface consultants? Perhaps all of the above resulting in it costing a lot less to create your own typeface? Would love to know.
Or maybe it's just everyone drowning in VC money and needing places to spend it?
It's the cost. Licensing of fonts can be quite expensive. For example, if you are a big multinational and you get a site license for a font for marketing, you're looking at a couple million a year minimum. On the other side, if you hire a firm to design a font, it's a one time payment of a couple hundred thousand, plus you own the rights in perpetuity. It makes a lot of sense to just take the time and make a font that works for you and to which you own the rights when you look at the economics.
[https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/#why-go-custom]
I think this is a really nice presentation of a font and its inspiration. Lots of hater comments here. OK. Go straight to the GitHub, that’s fine. But this site shows a lot of the finer details in a nice way. Thumbs up.
75 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 89.3 ms ] threadSorry to be a Negative Nelly. I'm sure some devs worked hard on that sigh. I do like the typeface itself.
Edit: (2018) in the title would be in order.
The page design trend though feels user hostile. No, you can't scroll directly to the information. Your eyes must see all this JavaScript glory
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701009
But really, it's jarring, jumpy, doesn't feel consistent (why are some transitions done by scrolling and others by clicking, when they look the same?), choppy, unnecessarily interactive, it's simply awful. There are good interactive content experiences on the web, this isn't one of them.
Compare with: "The Pianist and the Lobster" in the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/21/opinion/edito...
If you landed on this site, it's because you found IBM Plex elsewhere and decided to take some time to find out more about it. And IBM knows you have a choice of thousands of fonts, so it purposely wants to go overboard on the presentation, show you how much thought went into these fonts, and hopefully even make you a bit nostalgic or emotional.
It's also a typography presentation, anyone viewing it on mobile isn't really the target audience anyway.
That being said, I still think its a poor all-around presentation.
I had underestimated how often the frameworks/languages chosen was influenced by a developer simply wanting to built up skills in that area, rather than it being the best tool for the job.
But, interestingly enough, it seems to me that this can often lead to great results! The developer is motivated both to prove that their decision could solve the problem and also to learn the technology for reasons beyond that project alone.
It seems that might be what’s going on here: the graphic designer is flexing, and a page about a font is trending on HN.
For the target audience, who think about typefaces more critically, there is value in a deep dive into the unique characteristics of this typeface. The why, the how. The entire site experience expresses and reinforces these ideas.
[0]https://www.lovefrom.com/
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861601
They also tend to get upvoted to the top, where they choke out interesting conversation. That's where this one was before I marked it off-topic.
The upvotes are the greater problem, but it's harder to do anything about that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If I were to guess, whoever designed the page was consciously riffing off of Paul Rand's (designer of the IBM logos that this typeface is based on) graphic work, particularly from the late 70s to early 90s:
https://www.paulrand.design/work/IBM.html
Except that the colors in particular which were a bold choice in print, are positively eye-watering on modern screens.
It's a nice font though, and they are right, it is distinctly IBM, it looks like IBM.
IBM made computing machines for 20 years before it entered the typewriter market.
In particular, IBM was formed by amalgamating various subsidiary companies, so there's no "first product". Even if you focus on the Computing Scale Company, I think their first product was a computing scale and the cheese slicer was later.
That said, the IBM cheese cutter restoration video is very cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8VhNF_0I5c
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...
+ Readex Pro
+ Be Vietnam Pro
Favorite if you need many or all languages:
+ IBM Plex
+ Noto Sans (of Google Android fame)
But yeah, IBM Plex is very well done. These are all available on Google Fonts, and specifically designed for readability.
For serif, the one true style, I'm partial to Go Mono, but my current fascination is DSE Typewriter.
Each section doesn't fit on my screen by itself like I think it intends to.
More concretely, is it too much to expect that fonts have ligature support by default? I get it that certain fonts, for historical and aesthetic reasons do not support them.
For me, having ligatures, especially in a fixed width font I'm going to use for coding, is a deal-breaker.
YMMV
Sorry for the confusion.
OK font, pointless website and not a smart choice of name, when we hear Plex the thing that comes to mind is the Plex streaming/home DLNA software [0] we all know.
Well to be honest, the first thing that comes in my mind is the PLEX programming language [1] for Ericsson telephone exchanges, that I know and have used in the past.
[0] https://www.plex.tv/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLEX_(programming_language)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Parallel_Sysplex#Sysplex
Just show me some samples.
https://github.com/IBM/plex/tree/master/IBM-Plex-Sans-Variab...
My preferred implementation: https://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font
I wonder if anyone hacked up contemporary BIOSes to include it yet.
[1] https://github.com/yuru7/PlemolJP [2] http://lofi.limo
IBM Plex – A new typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701009 - March 2018 (170 comments)
Is there something that happened in the typography world a few years ago that has resulted in what feels like a cambrian explosion of custom typefaces attached to companies?
Ubiquitous WebFont support? Better font tooling? Higher amount of talented typeface consultants? Perhaps all of the above resulting in it costing a lot less to create your own typeface? Would love to know.
Or maybe it's just everyone drowning in VC money and needing places to spend it?
I'm not aware of a VC-backed company that has joined the trend, do you have an example?