IBM Plex is an open sourcetypeface superfamily conceptually designed and developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday to reflect the brand spirit, beliefs and design principles of IBM and to be used for all brand experiences across the company internationally. Plex will replace Helvetica 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 and true italics to complement them.
IBM Plex Sans – A grotesquesans-serif typeface with a design that was inspired by Franklin Gothic. Other sans-serif classifications were rejected on the basis of being too soft, inefficient and overly perfected. 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 i, j, t and x letters.
IBM Plex Serif – A transitionalserif typeface with a design that was inspired by Bodoni and Janson. Other serif classifications were rejected for being too humanist and outdated and too clunky and unrefined for long text. 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 alphabet, as well as Cyrillic. 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 Korean – Added support for the Hangul alphabet, released on 8 June 2020.
In addition, both Mike Abbink and Bold Monday have confirmed to be working on support for CJK, Bengali, Tamil and Kannada. There is also support for common mathematical and currency symbols 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 and double prime symbol. In addition Mike Abbink has confirmed support for the Mathematical Operators block and support for the symbols used in the APL programming language in 2019. The FCC#ECE0 and CE marking#EFCC logos are encoded as glyphs within the Private Use Area. Prior to version 1.0, five IBM logos #EBE1 to #EBE7 were also encoded as glyphs.
Licensing
IBM has licensed the font files only under the SIL Open Font License. Although between 9 August 2018 and 21 August 2018, the fonts were additionally 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; however, FontLab Studio which is proprietary software is required in order to build the fonts from source. Bold Monday also provide web development code in CSS, SCSS and JavaScript 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.
