Carbon vs Swiss
カーボン / スイス・スタイル
Carbon comes from Design Systems and Swiss from Functionalism. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Carbon
IBM's openly published and maintained design system, the working form of the IBM Design Language. Its skeleton is the 2x Grid, where an eight pixel mini unit is halved or doubled to size everything, the IBM Plex typeface, and a color model that stacks neutral grays as layers with one core blue reserved for action.
Swiss
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Puts order front and center and makes the information itself the protagonist.
| Carbon | Swiss | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2016– | 1950s– |
| Family | Design Systems | Functionalism |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Rectangular controls with almost no corner radius, and input fields ruled only along the bottom edge / White and #f4f4f4 surfaces stacked alternately, the ground shifting one step in value at every layer / A single blue, #0f62fe, appearing only where something can be acted on, everything else near neutral / One typeface family, IBM Plex, from display headings down to captions, with nothing else mixed in | Strict grid / Sans-serif type / Asymmetry / Objective photography |
| Best used for | Shipping an enterprise admin screen in both a light and a dark theme without redesigning either · Giving several teams a shared and explainable basis for spacing and column widths | Making complex information fast to read · Giving an organization rationality and transparency |
| Type | Set everything in IBM Plex, using the tighter productive styles in product and the larger expressive styles for editorial. Pick sizes from the published steps rather than inventing them. | Neutral sans-serif; be bold with size contrast |
| Composition | Base the geometry on the eight pixel mini unit. Derive columns by starting at one and halving, and keep every margin and padding a whole multiple of the unit. | 12-column grid, left-aligned, asymmetric |
| Material | Stack gray surfaces as layers and shift the ground one value step wherever a layer changes. Spend the blue only on things that can be acted on, and keep alert colors separate. | White space and objective photographs; almost no ornament |
| Caution | Hard coding hex values breaks the layering the moment the theme flips between light and dark, because the whole system assumes color is chosen by role instead. | Too much tidiness turns anonymous. Keep one strong jump in scale. |