Interstate Font

Tobias Frere-Jones designed Interstate as a reinterpretation of the Highway Gothic signage tradition. The source traces that lineage to American highway alphabets developed in the late 1940s, associated with Theodore Forbes, J. E. Penton and E. E. Radek.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

This is a commercial typeface interpretation, not a certificate that a design meets a highway-sign standard. Inspect numerals, capital spacing and similar letter shapes for the project’s actual viewing conditions. A reference to signage does not make every use automatically legible at a distance.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

For an event-direction board, compare short place names and a longer instruction. Keep arrows and word hierarchy consistent, then inspect the actual scale. Barlow and Rajdhani provide independent sans comparisons with different proportions; neither is a highway-standard alphabet.

For independent comparisons, try Barlow and Rajdhani. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use Adobe Fonts to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Interstate font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.