Overpass (typeface)

Overpass is a geometric sans-serif digital typeface, derived from Highway Gothic, but instead with a focus on usage as a webfont on digital screens for user interfaces and websites. It was designed by Delve Withrington with Dave Bailey, Thomas Jockin, Alan Dague-Greene, and Aaron Bell between 2011–2021. Overpass comprises 18 variants: 9 font weights and corrected obliques for each weight.

The Overpass typeface was commissioned by Red Hat exclusively for use in their software for UI elements. At that time, the commercial typeface Interstate was Red Hat's corporate typeface but it was not available as a webfont and the time it took to generate new images with each new update of their software were the motivators to commission Overpass.

Overpass was initially developed for Red Hat by Delve Withrington in 2011 and had only two weights (regular and bold) with hinting for the TrueType format fonts performed by Jason Campbell. The 2015 update to version 3.0 was developed by Delve Withrington with assistance from Dave Bailey, Thomas Jockin, Alan Dague-Greene, and expert consultation by Michael Luton on Overpass Mono. The newly rebuilt family was released as open source and included the addition of six more weights plus corrected oblique "italic" styles and a new monospaced version called Overpass Mono, which itself has a range of 5 weights.

In 2021, with the sponsorship of Google Fonts, the typeface was expanded again by Delve Fonts with the addition of Variable versions and support for Cyrillic script. Post-production assistance on that version (4.0) was provided by Aaron Bell on behalf of Google Fonts.