IBM Plex Sans

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Mike Abbink, Bold Monday

Foundry

Bold Monday

Released

2018

Category

Sans-serif

Alternative to

Helvetica

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Interfaces, Body text, Branding, Documentation

Weights

100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

1,025

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Vietnamese

Download size

637 KB

Source

github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/ibmplexsans

Questions

Is IBM Plex Sans free for commercial use?

Yes. IBM Plex Sans is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement. You can use it in client work, in products you sell, on the web and in print. The one thing you may not do is sell the font file on its own. The licence is inside the download.

Can I use IBM Plex Sans in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in IBM Plex Sans belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Mike Abbink, Bold Monday. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install IBM Plex Sans?

Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 2 font files inside and open them, then press Install Font. On Windows, select them, right-click and choose Install. Restart any application that was already open before it will show up. IBM Plex Sans is a variable font: those files carry all 7 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for IBM Plex Sans that is the regular weight. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 42 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.

Does IBM Plex Sans support Turkish?

Yes. IBM Plex Sans includes the characters Türkçe needs that plain Latin does not — the dotless ı, the dotted İ, and ğ, ş, ü, ö and ç in both cases. This was checked against the font file itself, not assumed from the fact that it covers Latin.

What languages does IBM Plex Sans support?

IBM Plex Sans covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek and Vietnamese, across 1,025 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

Does IBM Plex Sans support Cyrillic?

Yes. IBM Plex Sans includes the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Cyrillic Extended set as well, which adds the letters for languages beyond Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian. This was read from the font file itself. The complete WOFF2 and the zip both carry it; only the Latin-only web file leaves it out.

What weights does IBM Plex Sans come in?

IBM Plex Sans comes in 7 weights: Thin (100), Extra Light (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600) and Bold (700). It is a variable font, so every one of them is in a single file and you can also set any weight in between.

Is there a smaller, Latin-only version of IBM Plex Sans?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 114 KB against 257 KB for the complete file, 55% smaller, with every weight the family has still in it. It covers Latin and Latin Extended, which is everything a page in English, Turkish or a western European language sets — Türkçe included, since ı, İ, ğ and ş all live in that range. Take the complete file instead if you set Cyrillic, Greek or any alphabet outside Latin.

Where can I download IBM Plex Sans as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is ibm-plex-sans.woff2, and it is about 257 KB. It is the complete font repacked for the web rather than a cut-down copy: the same glyphs, the same spacing and the same hinting as the .ttf in the download, roughly 60% smaller. Every browser still receiving updates reads WOFF2, so it is the only web format most sites need. Google Fonts does not offer this file for download at all — it serves WOFF2 from its own servers and gives you .ttf if you ask for the family.