Type Study: DIN vs. Interstate
Cal Poly’s Advanced Typography class tasked students to compare and contrast commercially popular typefaces of similar appearance. To an untrained eye, numerous typefaces can be blanketed as “Times New Roman”, “Arial”, and “Bodoni”, however a designer must consider the subtle nuances of the O’s bowl, the E’s arm, the i’s tittle, and M’s crotch and its combined legibility and perceived identity.
Software: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign
Key words: typography, poster design
Interstate
Interstate is a sans-serif font that was crafted by Tobias Frere-Jones in the 1990s. The Interstate font family is a reinterpretation of Highway Gothic, which has been the official typeface for American highway signage for decades. Its design is based on signage alphabets developed in the late 1940s by Dr. Theodore Forbes and assistants. Its wide spacing is ideal for signage and display usage.
Notable qualities of the typeface include its heavier regular weight, ovular bowls, "incomplete" descenders, and oblique ends for both ascenders and descenders. The font is used by a number of large organizations in their logotype and branding materials. Brands using Interstate includes CITI Bank,
DIN
DIN is a sans-serif font designed by Volker Schnebel in 1984. The typeface has 48 different styles with 949 glyphs. Origins of the DIN font, which stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung, come from DIN 1451. Due to its simple design and legibility, it has been used for traffic signage and can be described as industrial and grotesque.
DIN can be described as professional and easily legible with an air of youthfulness. The font is often used digitally for websites, e-books, and apps on desktop and mobile devices. Notable qualities of the typeface include a tall x-height, square-ish bowls, and rectangular tittles. This font has been used for company logos such as DirectTV, Forever 21, and the Italian University for Design.
These three posters were my first drafts. The left poster emphasized the slanted ascenders of Interstate through page layout design. The center poster highlighted the straight vs. slanted ascenders with a spotlight. The right poster did not highlight anything in particular and was the weakest of the designs.
A common denominator
Both typefaces’ simple design and great legibility lend to their usage on some of the most-viewed copy of all: road signs. Interstate is used in the US while DIN is used in Germany. I drew upon this common denominator when designing the final poster.
"Speed Limit Sign" by chadelliott2012 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Orli-Wald-Allee" by Manfred Menzel is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
The final poster
The final poster drew upon the typefaces’ common roadsigns denominator while including some key design choices from my original drafts.
The stoplight motif highlights primary differences between DIN and Interstate, summed up in 3 simple shapes on the lowercase l’s. Copy is reduced to improve readability. Color is used sparingly to emphasize contrast.