Typeface

As the patented typeface for our diverse and global brand, IBM Plex is just as important as our name or our logo. It fine-tunes the tone of our words. It represents who we are and what we believe—as a company and as designers. Every decision is made with purpose; every detail has a reason for being.

With four subfamilies, eight weight and and two styles (roman and italic), IBM Plex can do just about anything you need it to. Just download the latest from GitHub, add to your font manager, activate and enjoy. To learn more with a deep dive into details and the story, visit the Plex website.

We’ve included the type tester so you can play with Plex and explore all its styles, weights and languages. The typeface really comes to life once it’s set in words or paragraphs, so feel free to type away!

IBM Plex comes with some additional basic features like ligatures across Sans and Serif as well as fractions, arrows, alternate glyphs and global currency symbols. These can be accessed through OpenType features and glyph palettes in the standard design tools available. Get the latest Plex.

The monospaced version of IBM Plex is especially designed to fit every glyph into a 600 unit space which takes its cues from the typewriter era. Monospaced fonts are used for coding by developers and should also be used to demonstrate code snippets in our communications and specifications.

IBM Plex covers over 100 languages with extended Latin versions. These cover the typographic needs for executing communications and other typographic situations across the international community. All four sub-families are covered in the extended Latin which includes Vietnamese. In addition Plex covers a growing set of non-Latin scripts which currently include Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai.

Global languages are part of the long-term plan for the IBM Plex typeface family. Non-Latin language designs are currently in development. The available non-Latin are shown below with what’s also in the pipeline.

The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) are currently in our development schedule and will kick-off later in 2018 and carry on until the end of 2020 or maybe sooner. The Hangul (Korean) will be the first in development and will be complete end of 2019. In the meantime we have chosen CJK typefaces that can work well with the IBM Plex Family.

IBM Plex design has been awarded a patent and is the intellectual property of IBM. The basic OFL License can be found in the downloadable font files. If alternative licensing is needed when embedding or bundling IBM Plex into software packages, please contact the appropriate legal teams or Lisa Lind.

Because Plex is open source we felt it was important to include it in the Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit Libraries to help make it available for all people to use. However, the fonts in these libraries may not have the latest versions so we always recommend going to the IBM Plex GitHub repo.

The IBM Plex team is a world-class group of type design experts hailing from Austria, China, Croatia, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Poland, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As the non-Latin variations grow more, so will our international team of type designers.

The IBM Store has an exclusive collection of Plex merchandise ranging from a coffee mug, cool tees and totes. Please check out the collection and let us know what you think. We will be updating the designs periodically to keep them fresh, fun and expressive.

Soon after the release, IBM Plex (Latin) won recognition in an international competition by the Type Directors Club in TDC 64 2018. Plex took away a judge’s choice award for typographic excellence. Let’s see how the non-Latin scripts do as we develop them and also submit to more global competitions. Plex has also been awarded several international patents.

Please address all inquiries or issues on GitHub and be sure to download the latest here.