How Mike Abbink and His Team Built IBM Design to Celebrate Man and Machine
Before the designer arrived at the Big Blue, the company had a remarkable design legacy but no formal design language. So he made it his mission to establish one, starting with a new typeface.
IBM recently launched a brand-new, proprietary, open-source typeface called Plex. The design and development of this crisp, man-meets-machine font is part of a bigger initiative to develop the company’s Design Language and share it with the world. The man behind this mission, IBM’s executive creative director of brand experience and design, Mike Abbink, is as colorful and varied as the project itself — with nearly as many unexpected twists, turns, and opinions.
Abbink’s path to IBM began rather inauspiciously by getting kicked out of prep school in Georgia. In order to right the ship and help pay for school, Abbink joined the army, serving six years in active duty. Post army found him ensconced at ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, earning two degrees: one in fine art, the other in graphic design and packaging.
Though Abbink is a graphic designer to the core, he has been designing fonts since 1992, releasing his first typeface, FF Kievit, in 2001 and Milo in 2006. He’s worked for everyone from Apple (with Mr. Jobs), MetaDesign, Wolff Olins, and MoMA. We recently spoke with Abbink about IBM’s remarkable design legacy (from meat slicers to typewriters and quantum computers to artificial intelligence), the importance of aesthetics, and why design is not a democracy.
The long and winding road to typography
Before I discovered graphic design, I was much more of a fine art guy. I loved the abstract expressionists, and I still do. But they are the opposite of what I like in graphic design — grid-driven, Swiss design. I used to love Frank Gehry. Now I hate Frank Gehry. Now I like Herzog and de Meuron. All of this is based on the things you start to learn as you become immersed in graphic design — grids, systems, structure. All of my taste in design culminates in Modernist systems, and type exists in that same house.
Studying graphic design at ArtCenter, toward the end of my junior year, they introduced digital type design. I had already taken Lettering I and Lettering II as part of the foundational curriculum. And they introduced digital type design as an elective, so I took that with the teacher who was my lettering teacher, Leah Hoffmitz, who has since passed away. ArtCenter created what is called the Hoffmitz-Milken Center for Typography in her honor. I’m on the board of advisers there. Leah was amazing, and she’s really how I got into digital type and font making.
After school, I got a job at MetaDesign, which Erik Spiekermann founded, and FontShop — one of the first digital type foundries to come out with fonts designed by designers for designers — is part of MetaDesign. I had been working on my first font, FF Kievit, during this time, and Spiekermann saw it and said, “We’ll take it into the library; you just need to finish it.” And that took me another three years to finish it with the help of Christian Schwartz.
On being a designer who is also a typographer, and vice versa
If you were to remove typography from my skill set, I would be a full-fledged, through and through graphic designer with an accomplished career. There are not too many graphic designers who, in parallel, go deep into the design of typefaces. They use typefaces, of course, but most of them don’t design them. There is a handful and I am one of those graphic designers who also designs typefaces. And then there are those who design typefaces but don’t do graphic design. And that’s probably the majority of typographers.
A few times, I’ve been lucky enough to have my role at agencies or companies where I’ve been hired as a graphic designer or creative director, like IBM, to focus solely on designing typography. Which is kind of weird and definitely unique.
Defining IBM’s design POV
The first thing you design when designing a font is the framework, the story, the narrative, the conceptual model. At the beginning, you have to ask the questions: What is IBM Design? If there was such a thing as IBM Design with some principles, how would a typeface reflect that? What historically about IBM would influence the typeface? So what design principles are in place that we can tap into? And we discovered that there really weren’t any.
Despite IBM’s design legacy, its design language and principles had never been codified, never written down. IBM’s approach to design was built by a group of people who came together and made a lot of amazing things that left huge impressions. And then they left. And when they left, that language left. There was no such thing as IBM Design past the individuals who we know created it — Paul Rand, Elliot Noyes, Eero Saarinen, Ray and Charles Eames.
So step one is, before design, what is there about IBM Design that we can tap into? We used Helvetica for 40 years, we used Bodoni for 40 years, we used Jenson. We designed the font Courier. It was designed at IBM for the Selectric typewriter.
Then you have to ask, What is it about these corporate typefaces that represents the brand? And what have we done regarding design that has been the root of how we design things? Has anything been written? Not a brand philosophy. There has been plenty written about IBM as a brand, and the brand attributes have existed for years and years. Great. But what does that brand think about design and what is the purpose of design through the lens of the brand. Just like what does the brand think about accessibility or women’s rights or the workforce? The brand has a point of view on things. What is the brand’s point of view on design? That did not exist. We have defined that in the past three years.
There needs to be a story, a rigor, and a reason, and a logic, and a framework, and a model behind everything you design.
Turning a legacy into a typeface
IBM invented the meat slicer. IBM invented the punch card. IBM put a man on the moon. IBM created the mainframe computer. IBM created the Selectric typewriter. All of these things that transformed industries, transformed human behavior, transformed our relationship with work, with leisure. IBM did all of that. So how does a font represent that? What are some of the stories that have been told? What stories are being told now? And all of that is, in simple terms, the story of man and machine.
IBM is developing our quantum computer, the fastest computer in existence, in New Castle, New York. It is being built by humans in an Eero Saarinen building. All the tooling, all the parts, all the chips, are made by hand an hour from New York City, with the exception of a few things brought in from the outside. It was made by humans. Man and machine. Inseparable.
Artificial intelligence — Watson — is an inoperable thing without humans telling it what to do or teaching it and training it. The meat slicer is nothing if a human is not engaging with it. So IBM celebrates the discourse between man and machine. How humans interact with and utilize machines, and how in turn machines help transform industry and behavior. IBM is all about how the two support each other. So that is the premise at the very root of Plex.
Building a design language on a font
Now a font is a great place to start to build a thorough design language because it’s words. Take the words out of a piece of software or a website, you’ve got zilch. Take the words out of an ad or an event or an immersive digital experience, and you’ve got zilch. So Plex is an important piece to help us start to carry the flag about unification of design principles and the fact that there needs to be a story, a rigor, and a reason, and a logic, and a framework, and a model behind everything you design. And that didn’t exist anywhere within IBM, and that’s why we redesigned everything, from the design philosophy to a new design language to a one-design system, so we can all work together as a massive team.
Good design is not a democracy
With the best brands in the world, the design decision making is held dearly by a few people. The whole concept of design is based on the fact that it can’t be done by many. Because as soon as it becomes done by many, it’s no longer design! Name a brand that is known for design that has democratized the decision of the design of the thing they make. It doesn’t happen. It’s never heard of. It’s never been done. Because as soon as you do that, you dismantle the one thing you’re trying to maintain and sustain as a point of view.
On aesthetics
We’ve been talking a lot about aesthetics during this project. A lot of people run away from that term today because it doesn’t sound very welcoming — “Oh, they’re talking about pre-defined beauty,” etc. But there is another way to define aesthetics. It’s the beliefs and set of principles that dictate your outward appearance and behaviors. Those beliefs and principles yield an aesthetic. So you can’t have one without the other.
IBM as a brand believes in progress and being essential. And in doing so, we build bonds and relationships with clients, with partners, with the parts you are using to make the thing or experience whole. So our design language — our principles — must support the idea of being a guide. Because that is our role as IBM — to be a guide. We are guiding people — a user, a client, a colleague — through experiences, whatever those may be. And in order to do that successfully and for people to trust you, you must have sound principles, solid beliefs, and refined aesthetics that come out of those. There’s no other way.
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