For the Love of Interstate

If you spend as much time as I do driving, road signs and highway markers often fly by at increased speeds without so much as a glance. Interstate, the typeface most closely related to that of highway signage, tends to fade into the landscape as attention can be diverted else where. With its recent adoption by TS for internal and client work, no matter how fast I get to the office, I’m surrounded by the font and it’s many faces and weights. With its growing popularity, I’m waiting for an Interstate film to replace Helvetica as the typography documentary to see.

Interstate is a neo-grotesque typeface, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones, to model closely after the font the US Federal Highway Administration developed in 1949 for road signage. It is also used in Canada, Mexico, The Netherlands, and elsewhere because of its readability at a distance and high speeds. When not applied to signage, Interstate is also used as display font for headings, call-outs and other featured content in publications and branding.

With the recent redesign of the TS brand, Interstate was chosen to replace Helvetica and Weidemann, as our studio fonts of choice. The past identity began to feel dated, and Interstate offered a modern alternative, with a number of faces to accompany. The font is strong enough to stand alone, so many applications are derived from typographic word art where the focus is on message.

Clients such as NSVRC and the Institute for Strategic Management Inc. have also been brought into the fold with Interstate being one of, if not the, primary typeface. For the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, Interstate pairs with Trajan to balance modern sans serif with a classic serif typeface. With the text-heavy nature of NSVRC publications, Interstate is used in the majority of copy to produce utmost readability in body and focal attention to callouts with bold and other heavier faces. In the case of the Institute for Strategic Management, everything from the logo and brochure, to web site headers and video production elements are all handled with Interstate. The brand is built upon the technical and modern applications of the font and showcases the state-of-the-art techniques ISM utilizes.

With its modern characteristics and contemporary style, it’s hard not to appreciate Interstate for it ability to represent action and progress. Companies and institutions looking to replicate these ideas often employee Interstate somewhere in their identity system. This has been just a tiny sample and there are countless to explore, but, at the very least, this may get you to focus a little longer on the next exit sign you pass.

Some other examples of Interstate

I Tweet, Therefore I Am

Quick trip in the Wayback Machine

I was perusing my local grocery store yesterday, on my tri-weekly food adventure, when I found some very interesting packaging, screaming at me from the overstocked shelves. What I saw, scattered around the aisles was the recent trend with consumer products of using ‘retro’ or ‘Throwback’ boxes and containers. Calling back from one of their first, or an original package designs, you won’t find any photoshopped perspiration, or seemingly computer generated character illustrations. Advertised as ‘Refreshingly Retro,’ this is the first time I can recall that I agree with some Pepsi marketing. The clean simple look is an oasis on the eyes, in the wasteland of overly generic, consumer-tested, mish-mash that is the supermarket landscape.

Companies using these throwbacks are primarily the big dogs of consumerism, and usually sell sugary products to kids. Canola Oil with a really illustrated nameplate and cool character mascot may entice me to buy it, but no 6 year old is going to leave the store crying because mommy didn’t get her favorite brand. Pepsi Co, the Hershey Company and General Mills have all embraced their past. These companies have stood the test of time, and kudos to them for having a past worth recalling. I’m sure there’d be more vintage boxes on the shelves if more companies had the same lasting power and brand recognition. Though I don’t consume a lot of the products I saw, I’ll buy a 12 pack of Mountain Dew and have it sit in my apartment gathering dust, just so I have a copy of Willy the ‘Mountain Man’ sipping from a moonshine-esque jug, yelling Ya-hoo, Mountain Dew.

Obviously the line-drawing mascot characters and hand-done typography are my favorite part of these vintage layouts. It’s just another example of how impressed I am with the by-gone era, when designers consistently used hand-done elements. Gradients… HA: blend layers… please;  dimensionality… get serious; all these packages need are a concept, and a creative hand.

Here’s to you ’60s Cap N’ Crunch!