ITC Clearface® Font Field Guide

Best Practices

ITC Clearface is ideal when space is at a premium. It features small (almost slab) serifs, a large x-height and minor contrast in stroke weight. ITC Clearface also contains many distinctive characters which distinguish the design from other faces.

Family

ITC Clearface is available in regular, bold, heavy and black weights, each with an italic compliment.

Font Facts

• Clearface Bold was the first weight the drawn for ATF. The rest of the family followed, one design at a time, over the next six years. The result was a family that was serviceable but lacked the continuity of current typeface designs.
• ITC commissioned Victor Caruso to re-draw the Clearface family to modern standards. Starting his design process with the medium weight, Caruso develop a full family of harmonizing designs.

Roots

ITC Clearface, as its name implies, is a utilitarian typeface that is easy to read. When originally designed in 1907, it was fashioned primarily for display applications. In designing ITC Clearface, Victor Caruso’s main goal was to adapt the original design for use on contemporary typesetting devices at a variety of sizes.

Legibility

ITC Clearface, as its name implies, is a utilitarian typeface that is easy to read. It could be argued that Clearface was the first “legibility” typeface, the progenitor of faces such as Century Schoolbook, Corona and Excelsior.

Download a PDF version of the ITC Clearface Font Field Guide and view the ITC Clearface font family.