Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Interstate

Road signage redrawn as a retail typeface

Interstate is a type family by Tobias Frere-Jones derived from Highway Gothic signage. Frere-Jones redrew the letterforms, added missing characters including accents and an ampersand, and retained the source material's inherent irregularities. Contributors include Cyrus Highsmith, Nina Stössinger, Davy Dai, and Richard Lipton.

Set in Interstate

Insights

Frere-Jones deliberately preserved the irregularities present in Highway Gothic rather than normalizing them into a conventional type design.
The project required filling genuine character-set gaps in the source material, including diacritics and an ampersand absent from signage alphabets.
Development involved contributions from Cyrus Highsmith, Nina Stössinger, Davy Dai, and Richard Lipton alongside Frere-Jones.