Samples of Helvetica fonts. Source: WikipediaIBM, the 109-year old company, has been using Helvetica — or formerly Helvetica Neue — as the “corporate” typeface for many years at a cost of over $1 million per year. This week, IBM announced that it is replacing Helvetica with a more “representative” typeface called IBM Plex.

To change the corporate font is a major milestone for IBM; the new font — like Helvetica before — will be used in all correspondence and activities, including in software, powerpoint presentations, websites, signage, marketing flyers and more. The new IBM Plex will be available in serif and sans serif and ready to be used in 110 languages.

IBM Plex is open source, so it will be available as a free product for anyone.

Helvetica was created in 1957 by Max Miedinger, a graphic designer and Eduard Hoffmann, the president of the company Haas Type Foundry of Switzerland. The name of the font is the Latin name for Switzerland, Helvetia.

IBM has been trying to create their own typeface for several years now, but the project never came to fruition. “It’s difficult. You have to find the right type designer who really gets you,” explains Terry Yoo, vice president of brand strategy and experience design. By 2015, however, Mike Abbink — a graphic designer who created the Inspira typeface for GE — joined IBM to develop the new font.

“When I came to IBM, it was a big discussion: Why doesn’t IBM have a bespoke typeface? Why are we still clinging to Helvetica?…Helvetica was a child from a particular set of modernist thinking that’s gone today,” explains Abbink. “Helvetica was right for the IBM of the 1960s, when the company wanted to change its image as a maker of meat grinders and cheese slicers to one as a producer of advanced business machines. Plex is about finding the quirkiness between manmade things and engineered moments and bringing that into letterforms,” explains Abbink.

There is also a more realistic reason to change the font. It happens that IBM spends over $1 million each year for the Neue Helvetica license. This is the reason not all 380,000 employees of IBM have Helvetica installed on their computers. By creating IBM Plex, this problem is solved. IBM Plex, this week, was installed in all IBMer’s computers, driving the last nail in Helvetica’s IBM reign.