AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Clearview font vs highway gothic font11/22/2023 ![]() Of the Highway Gothic derivatives, Interstate (designed by Tobias Frere-Jones over several years in the 1990’s) is by far the most robust, polished and well-known. You can see all these details in the Interstate BlackCondensed specimen at the top of the review, in the right column. I have to assume it was designed this way in an effort to prevent it from crowding other letters in the string. ![]() You’ll also find one of the strangest “g’s” I’ve ever seen, with a tail that shoots down and limply tries to curl back up to the left. If a highway font has a lowercase set, the straight ascenders and descenders of the stems will often terminate at a sharp angle, which is a clever trick to help drivers differentiate between vertical strokes while driving. The 2’s and 5’s will be weird as hell, the 1’s will have an awkward flag, and the stroke supporting the “6” and the “9” will feel truncated, causing the latter to feel like they might fall over. That “E’s” middle arm will be short and stubby, the G will be spurless. Characters like the “C” and “S” will have wide open apertures and the line where the bowls on the “P” and “R” and the middle arm on the “E” falls will be raised. There are a few consistent traits you’ll find across all the Highway Gothic revivals. Many of the revivals that exist are available at either low cost or for free, making it an accessible genre for designers to deploy in their work. The different interpretations and revivals of Highway Gothic that have been released over the years either embrace this quirkiness or attempt to smooth it out, allowing designers to bring as much or as little of the original’s eccentricity as they want into their design. The letterforms are simple, low contrast and unadorned, yet are brimming with character. The numerals are odd and unique while remaining legible and go a long way to adding charm to what could feel like a cold, mechanical design. If I had to hypothesize why this genre of fonts has remained so popular, I’d guess that it centers around the variety in the weights and widths available, their ubiquity in American culture, and the unpolished “wrongness” of many of the design details. Designers will always find a use for clean, clear letterforms, and that’s helped Highway Gothic and its descendants take on many new lives. Highway Gothic was designed to maximize legibility for road signs are highway speeds, but designers have found surprising and diverse uses for its derivatives in the decades since-everything from entertainment magazine interiors to vintage-themed branding projects. I’m always fascinated when a genre of typefaces finds widespread use outside its original intended medium. Therefore, this review will focus on the style as a whole, while addressing some of the more notable type families in greater detail. US Highway fonts are a genre of typefaces that I adore, but there are so many great interpretations that focusing any single typeface would mean missing out on a lot of stellar work. This review is a bit of a departure from the format I’ve established on this site.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |