Highway Gothic vs. Roadgeek

[Alaprine]

What's the difference? Which one should I use when designing highway signs for my driving game?

[Scott5114]

The typeface used on road signs in the United States is called FHWA Series, and is available in six different widths, FHWA Series B, Series C, Series D, Series E, Series E-Modified, and Series F. "Highway Gothic" is a slang term for this typeface family. It is often used because "FHWA Series" can sometimes be ambiguous, since FHWA is the federal government agency responsible for the highway system and is the one responsible for the design of the typeface.

FHWA does not provide a font file for any of these typefaces, only glyphs that one can use to make a font file. That is, FHWA doesn't make pies, they publish the recipe. One of the people on this forum made the "Roadgeek 2005" font series as an hobbyist implementation of the FHWA Series fonts. It includes a no-commercial-use clause in its license, which may or may not be applicable to your use. Another forum member later made the "Roadgeek 2014" fonts, again from scratch using the FHWA glyphs, in response to technical problems with the 2005 font set. I don't believe these carry a no-commercial-use restriction.

TL;DR: they're the same thing basically.

[davmillar]

Depending on your format, you may also want to consider Overpass as it's open source. I use it on my web game Interst8 and it works pretty well.

[Bickendan]

I still use the old Blue Highway font myself. I think that's a precursor to Roadgeek?

[Scott5114]

Overpass and Blue Highway are not really meant for creating accurate road sign graphics. Overpass was made by the Red Hat corporation, and Blue Highway by freeware font designer Ray Larabie. Like Tobias Frere-Jones' Interstate, they are meant more to provide a general-use typeface whose design merely resembles that of FHWA Series. Therefore, those fonts are designed with measurements that facilitate print or web use and not for display on a road sign. If you are attempting to make an accurate-looking sign, they should be avoided.

I just checked, and Roadgeek 2014 is released under the MIT license, so it is just as open-source as Overpass.

[bing101]

Highway Gothic is the best.

[Roadsguy]

The typeface used on road signs in the United States is called FHWA Series, and is available in six different widths, FHWA Series B, Series C, Series D, Series E, Series E-Modified, and Series F. "Highway Gothic" is a slang term for this typeface family. It is often used because "FHWA Series" can sometimes be ambiguous, since FHWA is the federal government agency responsible for the highway system and is the one responsible for the design of the typeface.

Must be where Microsoft got the inspiration for naming the new Xbox.

[machias]

I'm trying to find a TTF or OTF version of what I call the original version of Series D mixed case lettering. Anyone have leads?

The top version here is FHWA Series D, the bottom version is "Georgia D", which I created from an old Mac font called PIXymbolsD. A version very similar to Georgia D was used in the 70s in Syracuse, N.Y. on street blades.