IBM Plex Sans

Try IBM Plex Sans

Weights and styles

• Thin 100IBM Plex Sans Thin Thin Italic
• ExtraLight 200IBM Plex Sans ExtraLight ExtraLight Italic
• Light 300IBM Plex Sans Light Light Italic
• Regular 400IBM Plex Sans Regular Italic
• Medium 500IBM Plex Sans Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600IBM Plex Sans SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700IBM Plex Sans Bold Bold Italic

IBM Plex Sans is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file per style, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About IBM Plex Sans

IBM Plex Sans is a sans serif family in the grotesque tradition, drawn as the corporate typeface of IBM. The shapes are plain and even in stroke, yet engineered details show through: the capital I stands on horizontal serifs, and stroke ends are cut square. Mike Abbink of IBM designed the family together with Bold Monday; the font's own credits also name Paul van der Laan and Pieter van Rosmalen. Roman and italic each come in seven weights, Thin 100 to Bold 700, 14 styles in all. Both are variable fonts carrying a weight axis and a width axis that runs from 75 to 100, so the same files also give a condensed cut. The fonts hold 1,021 glyphs and cover Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese. Plex Sans has sibling Serif and Mono designs and was added to Google Fonts in 2018.

Where IBM Plex Sans works

Product interfaces

Even strokes and seven weights from Thin to Bold cover labels, navigation and headings inside one family.

Technical documentation

Plex Sans sets the prose while the Mono member of the same Plex family shows code samples, so both share one design.

Dense tables and column headers

Moving the width axis from 100 towards 75 narrows the letters, which fits long headers into tight columns without a change of typeface.

Corporate identity systems

A family drawn as a company typeface, with Serif and Mono relatives, keeps slides, reports and websites in one voice.

Products in several scripts

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese character sets let Russian, Greek and Vietnamese versions use the same typeface.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Cyrillic, Greek. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with IBM Plex Sans

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use IBM Plex Sans on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "IBM Plex Sans";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/IBMPlexSans-Italic-VariableFont_wdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "IBM Plex Sans";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/IBMPlexSans-VariableFont_wdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "IBM Plex Sans", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves IBM Plex Sans with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IBM+Plex+Sans:ital,wght@0,100..700;1,100..700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

The condensed cut is an axis

The variable files include a width axis from 75 to 100. Lower values give narrower letters; there is no separate condensed file in this package.

Bold 700 is the heaviest weight

The weight axis stops at 700. ExtraBold and Black do not exist in this family.

The name Plex is reserved

The license notice reserves the font name “Plex”, so a modified version has to be published under another name.

FAQs

Collections with IBM Plex Sans

• Clean sans-serif fonts for app interfaces

  Open-license sans-serif families that stay clear in buttons, menus, tables and settings screens, with the weights an interface needs.

• Grotesque sans-serif fonts

  Grotesque and neo-grotesque sans-serif families: plain, sturdy, slightly irregular workhorses for branding, editorial design and interfaces.

• Variable fonts with a width axis

  Variable families in which letter width is adjustable as well as weight, from slight narrowing for copy-fitting to a full condensed-to-wide range.

• Type systems with matching sans, serif and mono families

  Families designed to be used together: a sans, a serif or slab and often a monospace that share proportions, weights and character.

• Fonts that support Greek

  Open-license families with Greek glyphs beside Latin, for Greek-language sites and for mathematics, science and classics.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All sans serif fonts