I'll give the monospaced one a try in the terminal and see how it goes.
`r` is a little weird with its wide flat top, otherwise it's a great font. Would love to see Greek and Cyrillic support too.
IBM Type
121–130 of 130 posts
Re: IBM Type
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never an absolute, but for a similar justification to the you've given for white — it creates too much contrast, and is therefore most often (especially in print and on bright displays), uncomfortable to look at: "[Pure] black and white create the highest contrast possible".[0] HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you pla…
Printing websites with grey text on a laser printer usually gives you dithered and unpleasant to read text.
This should be solved with CSS media queries, e.g.
@media print { ... }Re: IBM Type
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never an absolute, but for a similar justification to the you've given for white — it creates too much contrast, and is therefore most often (especially in print and on bright displays), uncomfortable to look at: "[Pure] black and white create the highest contrast possible".[0] HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you pla…
Pure black and white don't create too much contrast. I'd like to see some actual research if anyone claims that it does. And there is a contrast button on every monitor to turn it down.
I don’t have numbers for you, but I do have a theory on why it makes sense. Monitor contrast has been going up for years to provide better photo and video quality. The screens I used in the 90’s couldn’t do black, only a dark shade of gray. In order to achieve the same apparent level of contrast as 20 years ago, you have to use dark gray text. People who’ve been around a while will instinctively do this to achieve an outcome that feels right, and those are the people who produce these guidelines.
Re: IBM Type
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pure black and white don't create too much contrast. I'd like to see some actual research if anyone claims that it does. And there is a contrast button on every monitor to turn it down.
Anecdotally, I find pure black + pure white rather uncomfortable to look at for any long period of time. (Pure white especially, but the combination of the two is particularly bad.) It wasn't always that way, maybe something to do with my current eyeglass prescription, or just fatigue from staring at monitors all day? I don't know. But regardless, one of the things I've learned about UI design is not to dismiss other…
It's better that people that are bothered by white backgrounds dial down the background light on the monitor. Saves energy too!
Re: IBM Type
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. The default view is the root directory listing, followed by the README. If your root directory happens to contain many files, the README will be below the fold. E.g., look at https://github.com/camlistore/go4 . Unless your monitor height is 1600 px and you're using 90% browser zoom, you might not even see the README until you scroll down.
That's why I tend to link to the anchor of the README title, if I can, e.g. https://github.com/ibm/type#ibm-type Something I picked up from @jsvine, who pointed out that when they open-source their data stuff from BuzzFeed, it makes it much more accessible for the general public when the first thing they see is not the code view.
Yeah, me too.
You can also link to #readme, which is a generic tag at the very top of the README and is guaranteed to exist in every github repo. E.g.:
Re: IBM Type
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never an absolute, but for a similar justification to the you've given for white — it creates too much contrast, and is therefore most often (especially in print and on bright displays), uncomfortable to look at: "[Pure] black and white create the highest contrast possible".[0] HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you pla…
>The abstinence of pure black doesn't irritate me, but taking design advice from IBM does :) It sounds vaguely like an appeal to authority suggesting that IBM is not in a position to give advice. Can you expand on that?
It's not an 'appeal to authority', just a hint that I'm reluctant to take design advice from IBM.
Why? As many other HNers have pointed out, the site that the font is being showcased on is hardly the pinnacle of good web design.
Re: IBM Type
#127“... to reflect our brand and our design principles” Out of interest - What does IBM’s brand mean to you? (Serious question) By that, I think I mean - what does IBM make you think of and what emotions does it instil in you when considering the company and brand?
[deleted]
Re: IBM Type
#128While interesting, is this really necessary? Call me skeptical, but value add = negligible, justification for an entire department to spend several months+ working = likely. I can see why companies like Apple and Microsoft would want to be involved in making fonts, they make their bread and butter by creating warm-fuzzies and having a consistent design language; IBM though, less so? Genuinely interested to hear other…
IBM is a large company (380K headcount) with a design staff. They produce A LOT of textual material for clients that are paying serious piles of money. Typography is a fickle, subtle thing that can influence people without them being aware of it. While on HN, folks may pretend to prefer stark naked HTML, that doesn't fly with the general public. IBM decided it needed a refresh in that area. Good for them and good for…
stark naked html doesn't necessarily imply ugly default styles. think of it as attempting to achieve perfection in fashion through doing as much as possible with as little as possible.
Re: IBM Type
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source? And did you mean Bold Monday? The ones who made the mono font for iA Writer?
yes, Bold Monday, sorry for the mistake fonts/ibm $ otfinfo -i IBMPlexSans-Regular.ttf Family: IBM Plex Sans Subfamily: Regular Full name: IBM Plex Sans PostScript name: IBMPlexSans Version: Version 1.000 Unique ID: 1.000;IBM ;IBMPlexSans Designer: Mike Abbink, Bold Monday Designer URL: http://www.ibm.com Manufacturer: Bold Monday Vendor URL: http://www.boldmonday.com Trademark: IBM Plex™ is a trademark of IBM Corp.,…
Mike Abbink shows up as Creative Director at IBM, in addition to being at Bold Monday.
Re: IBM Type
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, not everyone is on an OLED screen. Especially on desktops.
Sure, but a good LCD panel is still a lot closer to paper than any CRT ever way. At the lowest level, the state equations of photons don't include a "reflected" versus "emitted" term.
But light diffusion is a common part of analysing what an eye sees. Paper has a much larger scattering effect, whereas something backed by a light does not.