I've been using Plex Mono for my Emacs font on MacOS for about a week and it's very nice. It has replaced Hack for the time being.
The font has just the right amount of whimsy/flair for me, and the style of the italics is pretty neat.
IBM Plex – A new typeface
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Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#42From my experience dealing with IBM, I can only imagine this was the result of 5 different consulting teams, assisted by 3 different outsourced development groups, which was delayed numerous times, then Watson was added, and then a re-org caused by layoffs, which finally resulted in a website that couldn't scroll and caused the CPU of my high-end laptop to scream...
And "optimized" to run on their cloud bluemix or softlayer
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#43Anyone else find these sort of sites annoying to navigate? How am I supposed to know how much I need to scroll down? Is the site broken or do I just need to scroll more? Overall, I'm surprised it's taken IBM this long to put out a font.
This might be the worst version of this type of page I've ever seen.
I usually think comments on HN about UX are overreacted, but wow, this website is definitely awful.
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#44Anyone else find these sort of sites annoying to navigate? How am I supposed to know how much I need to scroll down? Is the site broken or do I just need to scroll more? Overall, I'm surprised it's taken IBM this long to put out a font.
It's almost like the UI designer took it as a personal challenge to see how horrible they could make the experience.
Or maybe they hired an animator as their UI designer.
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#45[deleted]
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#46Their website works horribly in Safari.
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#47Anyone else find these sort of sites annoying to navigate? How am I supposed to know how much I need to scroll down? Is the site broken or do I just need to scroll more? Overall, I'm surprised it's taken IBM this long to put out a font.
It feels like a debug system - like I'm single-stepping animations for their "pixel perfect" correctness.
There is a reason they didn't stop improving on animations after the flip book was invented.
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#48From my experience dealing with IBM, I can only imagine this was the result of 5 different consulting teams, assisted by 3 different outsourced development groups, which was delayed numerous times, then Watson was added, and then a re-org caused by layoffs, which finally resulted in a website that couldn't scroll and caused the CPU of my high-end laptop to scream...
It feels like there should be a 9-digit contract with a hapless government entity that stands no chance of actually getting the font they thought they were paying for.
...and as a result a $6B payroll project will be cancelled because the integrator was depending on IBM Plex being a drop-in replacement for Comic Sans Bold.
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#49Apple, Samsung, Netflix, now IBM... why does everyone need their own typeface? Is it to save on licensing fees? As a user, I don't really find these fonts very distinctive, so I don't associate them with their brands.
I think San Francisco and Roboto are distinctively Apple and Google respectively. I also think they matter more because they're system fonts on some of the biggest platforms (and maybe just because I happen to like them).
If I ever see this font again, I probably won't even know I'm looking at it.
Re: IBM Plex – A new typeface
#50Apple, Samsung, Netflix, now IBM... why does everyone need their own typeface? Is it to save on licensing fees? As a user, I don't really find these fonts very distinctive, so I don't associate them with their brands.
In the case of Netflix, it is specifically to save on licensing fees. Gotham is expensive, yo.
Apple's always had their own typeface, though I don't remember them using one as heavily as San Francisco. But it feels very in-character for them.
Samsung did it, I suspect, because Apple did.