I released Expressway Soft on March 3, 2016 as a companion to Expressway. The idea was simple: take the familiar road-sign–inspired forms of Expressway and give them a gentler look by rounding the corners. I used FontLab’s TransType, which had an early vector engine later developed into FontLab 6, to generate the softened shapes. The process was not reliable; it often failed on acute angles or dropped curves entirely, so I had to step in and clean up the outlines manually. Despite that, the overall effect suited the design, particularly at heavier weights where the softened corners were more noticeable.

The family included six weights plus italics, but no condensed versions. The lightest weight, where the strokes were extremely thin, barely showed the rounding, which gave it an almost untouched appearance. In contrast, the bolder weights emphasized the softened edges more strongly.

Version 1.1 appeared on October 29, 2024, reorganizing the weight names to make them clearer: Book became Light, and Light was renamed Extra-Light. Beyond that, no other changes were made. Expressway Soft has remained a minor variant, never widely used, but for me it was an experiment in how subtle adjustments to geometry could shift the mood of a utilitarian design.