The ITC Conduit® font family is a very unusual sans serif face which draws upon an “amateur” influence to bring the viewer a quirky type with plenty of character. It was created by Mark van Bronkhorst and released by the International Typeface Corporation and Linotype in 1997.
When he came up with the designs for the ITC Conduit font, Mark van Bronkhorst made a decision: to step outside the proverbial box and act on the whim of his imagination. Since the font’s inspiration was a series of letterforms drawn by someone (not van Bronkhorst) with limited design skills, it initially seemed to break all the typographical rules.
Described by van Bronkhorst as a face that might be found in instruction manuals, on boilers and so forth, the ITC Conduit design takes its interesting styling from a grid-based format. During its creation, the sharp ninety degree angles in the letterforms reminded van Bronkhorst of an electrical conduit - hence the eventual name of the face.
There are some very striking features – some of them quite unexpected – to be found in the font. The lowercase “t” for example is a particularly curious letterform.
When it came to designing the italic version of the face, van Bronkhorst simply skewed the roman style a little, breaking “every optical rule” and then adding alternate versions of “a,” “f,” “g” and the capital “E.” Van Bronkhorst described the italic type as “computer-generated swelling.”
When the font was published in 1997, Fast Company magazine commissioned van Bronkhorst to design additional weights and as a result, the ITC Conduit family was expanded to it's current size.
ITC Conduit
Weights of ITC ConduitThe ITC Conduit design is, despite its rule breaking tendencies, a real work of typographic art. All of the elements in the typeface come together, making for a legible and clear font. As a result, the ITC Conduit design is quite frequently used as a magazine typeface – a trend initially set by Fast Company magazine.
The font is equally capable of being used online as it is offline, being very readable both in print and onscreen. This quality also makes the typeface, in its various weights, very well suited to creative projects such as logo design.