Overpass
Delve Withrington, Dave Bailey, Thomas JockinSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sans-serif · Variable · 9 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Interstate alternatives
Tobias Frere-Jones, 1993, drawn from the Highway Gothic alphabet on American road signs.
Why people look for a Interstate alternative
Interstate comes out of American highway signage, which is where its unusual proportions and its clarity at distance come from. It is licensed commercially, and the weights and widths that make it useful for wayfinding are a large family to buy for what is often a single project.
What a Interstate substitute has to get right
The plain, faintly awkward capitals and the terminals cut on a hard angle. A substitute that tidies those away has kept the proportions and lost the reason anybody wanted the face.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Interstate and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Bought from a foundry under a commercial licence
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Only as the licence you bought allows
- On a website
- Usually a separate web licence on top
Interstate
| Property | Overpass |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 |
| Variable | Yes |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Vietnamese |
| Glyphs | 1,351 |
| Web font | 72 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Interstate?
- Overpass — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Interstate alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Interstate alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Interstate substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.