Digital Font, IBM Plex

IBM Plex is the open-source typeface family for IBM, released in 2017. Designed by Mike Abbink in collaboration with Paul van der Laan and Pieter van Rosmalen, co-founders of type foundry Bold Monday, IBM Plex is rooted in the international company’s history and design principles. Abbink implemented the design of a corporate typeface after joining IBM in 2015 to establish an in-house brand team, which had not existed at IBM since the days of Paul Rand.

With IBM Plex, Abbink sought to bridge the relationship between humankind and machine—central to IBM since the turn of the century—by balancing the natural and engineered moments of the typeface. He borrowed influences not only from IBM’s logotype, but from the historical typewriter typefaces that IBM commissioned or designed for the Selectric’s revolutionary typing ball, which is in Cooper Hewitt’s collection. The result is a grotesque typeface with an emphasis on countershapes and the squircle, the square-circle.

Cooper Hewitt’s collection includes the Sans and Mono styles of IBM Plex. Abbink and his team designed Sans as the family’s originating style. They developed Mono as both a tribute to the Selectric’s typefaces, which were all monospaced, and as the style for developers and engineers who are key IBM stakeholders. Mono Italic is particularly expressive. IBM Plex Mono is celebrated as a popular coding font and, collectively with Sans, the two have been featured in almost a million websites and used millions of times across the web.