Whenever I learn the name of a font, I start to see it
everywhere. Case in point: Interstate.
Interstate is a very nice, readable font. It looks pretty good for
headlines and isn't bad for body text either. The full family has a
wide variety of weights and it's not hard to find a suitable version
for your purposes.
It's inspired by the font used for U.S. interstate highway
signs. The sign font is actually "FHWA Highway Gothic" in various
series, but as far as I can tell it's not widely available. Mike the Actuary has made some
nice fonts inspired by the Highway Gothic fonts called Roadgeek Fonts.
The official Highway Gothic fonts are actually being retired for a
new font called Clearview. The designers of that font sell a version
of it called ClearviewHwy. Hey, that's a
nice font too...
Users
Hannaford has
recently started using Interstate for a lot its published
material. That's a good thing, because for a long time it was using
Verdana, which I hate
and is boring.
The Weather Channel has used
Interstate for a long time. The onscreen graphics look very nice with
this font. I think their logo uses Clearview. Good for you, The
Weather Channel, for sticking with the highway font theme.
Achewood uses Interstate for
speech bubbles and some titles.
The Bangor Daily News
uses Interstate for many titles and all photo captions.
The titles and other sans-serify type in Downeast Magazine are Interstate.
How to spot it
The tail of
lowercase "g" is an easy indicator. It looks like it tried to form a hook, but just
couldn't make it all the way.
Another dead giveaway is that many ascenders and descenders have
sharply angled tops or bottoms.
After a while, you just look at it and it yells "Interstate!" at
you.
