I released Blue Highway on February 9, 1998. At the time, there were no free digital versions of the FHWA Series of Standard Alphabets, commonly called Highway Gothic, so I wanted to make that style accessible. I had access to the FHWA drawings, though I didn’t trace them and largely ignored the grid in the specification. My goal was to capture the crude, engineered feel of the originals rather than to polish them into something more refined. I gave the typeface its name after the Billy Idol song “Blue Highway.”

All of my fonts were free when I began releasing them, so Blue Highway was offered with a free commercial license. It became a common alternative for designers who didn’t want to license Interstate, which was more polished and widely adopted. Blue Highway tended to turn up on lower-end products where budget or accessibility was the priority.

Over time, the limitations of the first release became clear. It had inconsistent stem widths, alignment problems, improper overshoots, and clumsy shapes such as the poorly drawn numeral 3. I removed it from Typodermic Fonts for a period, especially after Expressway became available as a more refined, free option. On November 2, 2011, I reissued Blue Highway with those basic flaws corrected, though I avoided over-refining the shapes. On November 2, 2022, I rebuilt it completely, using the original as a background guide to preserve proportions while redrawing the forms to eliminate the earlier problems.

I also created a Linocut variant by placing the regular Blue Highway on a mask layer and drawing polygonal shapes to simulate the fake linocut textures popular in 1990s clip art. It was less an authentic linocut and more a decorative variation. On April 2, 2024, I placed Blue Highway into the public domain, allowing it to circulate freely as a reference to one of the most widely seen typographic styles of the twentieth century.