ITC Clearface
Under license from ATF, in 1978 ITC commissioned designer Victor Caruso to re-draw the Clearface family to current standards. Caruso’s work adapts Bentons’ original design into a consistent family that is suitable for both text and display settings. Slightly condensed, 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.
Benguiat developed a full family of four weights plus complementary cursive designs. Benguiat also drew a suite of swash and alternate characters for each of the members of the family. When digital replaced photo as a typesetting technology, however, the special alternate and swash characters that Benguiat created were left out of the fonts. While most phototype display fonts could have virtually unlimited character sets, the first digital fonts could not.
ITC Resavska Sans
Olivera Stojadinovic made her first sketches of Resavska in the autumn of 2001, as part of a proposal for new currency in her native Serbia. Stojadinovic designed a sans serif weight for the project with the goal of creating a typeface that would be readable at small sizes. Unfortunately, the project was canceled and this version of Resavska was never used.
Some time later, Stojadinovic was asked to create a typeface family for the redesign of a weekly magazine. “I added geometric serifs to the earlier Resavska sans serif letters, and produced a new text face,” she recalls. About halfway through this project the magazine’s editor left his position and this project, too, was canceled.
Finally, a friend of Stojadinovic’s asked her to draw a typeface for yet another magazine. “I created a light weight of Resavska for this project,” says Stojadinovic. “I also drew the thin strokes a little thinner and made the serifs finer.” The end result combines calligraphic elegance and carefully structured, high-legibility design traits.