Blue Highway (1998) is a digital font inspired by Highway Gothic (1948). It was made by Ray Larabie, who you might also remember as the creator of the GTA font.
Blue Highway is public domain, and you can download it from 1001 Fonts or dafont.com.
When I originally released Blue Highway on February 9, 1998, I was aiming to fill a gap I’d noticed in the typography world. The FHWA Series of Standard Alphabets, commonly known as Highway Gothic, was this ubiquitous font used on road signs across many countries since the mid-20th century. But at the time, there didn’t seem to be any free options available for designers who wanted to capture that look. I was aware of Tobias Frere-Jones’ Interstate typeface from 1993, which was a more refined and text-friendly interpretation of highway signage typography. But I wanted to create something that stayed truer to the original Highway Gothic’s cruder, engineered look. The original was designed for simple geometric reproduction rather than aesthetics on paper, and I wanted to retain some of that clunky charm in Blue Highway. The name “Blue Highway” was inspired by that wonderful Billy Idol song. It felt fitting for a font inspired by road signage. I initially released Blue Highway with a free commercial use desktop license. My goal was to make this style of typography accessible to anyone who wanted to use it in their designs. Over the years, I’ve updated and refined Blue Highway. It underwent significant updates on November 2, 2011, and then a complete overhaul on November 2, 2022. These updates were about improving the font while still maintaining its essential character. I also created a decorative Linocut variant, which looks like an old hand-cut linoleum print. And the “D” variant is all caps, just like the original FHWA D variant, staying true to its roots. Later on, I created a more typographically friendly variant called Expressway, which we’ll get into another time. But Blue Highway remains closer to the original highway signage look. In April 2024, I decided to place Blue Highway into the public domain. It felt right to make this interpretation of such a widely seen typography style freely available for anyone to use or modify.
