What Font Does Zoom Use? Typography Behind the Brand

Zoom uses Lato as its primary UI typeface, a humanist sans-serif font designed by Polish type designer Łukasz Dziedzic.

For its logo, Zoom uses a custom typeface built on top of Kaleko 205, modified with rounded edges to match the brand’s friendly, approachable personality.

After its 2022 rebrand, Zoom introduced 2 additional custom typefaces: Happy Display for expressive brand materials and Almaden Sans as its utilitarian system font.

What Type of Font Is Lato?

Lato is a humanist font in the sans-serif category. It sits between geometric and grotesque classifications, which makes it unusually versatile.

A few key characteristics:

• Letterform style: Slightly rounded strokes with moderate contrast between thick and thin
• x-height: Tall, which improves legibility at small sizes on screens
• Weight range: Available in 10 styles, from Thin to Black with italics
• Tone: Professional at small sizes, warmer and more personal at display sizes

That balance between corporate and casual is exactly why it works for Zoom. A video call platform serves board rooms and birthday parties. Lato holds up in both contexts.

Happy Display, the brand’s custom display face introduced in 2022, is classified as an organic neogrotesque. Its bowed letterforms and open terminals give it a noticeably cheerful quality without being cartoonish.

Almaden Sans, the system font, leans toward the neo-grotesque side, prioritizing clarity and neutral functionality over personality.

Who Designed Zoom’s Fonts?

Lato was designed by Łukasz Dziedzic, a Polish type designer, and released in 2010. It was later published on Google Fonts under the Open Font License, which made it widely adopted across the design and tech industries.

Happy Display was created specifically for Zoom by Latinotype, a type foundry based in Chile. The foundry worked directly with Luciano Vergara, the original designer of their Internacional typeface, adapting it with Zoom’s design team. Zoom commissioned a custom “k,” modified terminal openings on several characters including “a,” “e,” “s,” “J,” and “S,” and adjusted the rectangular terminals throughout. The result contains 416 glyphs across 7 weights, each with matching italics.

Almaden Sans is a repackaged version of Suisse Int’l, produced by the Swiss foundry Swiss Typefaces. Zoom renamed and licensed it as part of the 2022 brand system. The name references Almaden, the street where Zoom’s San Jose headquarters is located.

The logo typeface was built on Kaleko 205, itself a geometric sans-serif inspired by classic faces like Gill Sans. Zoom’s design team customized it with rounded corners and adjusted proportions to make it distinctly theirs.

Is Zoom’s Font Free to Use?

Depends on which font you’re asking about.

Lato is free to download and use in personal and commercial projects. It’s one of the most popular fonts on Google Fonts, and there’s no cost involved.

Happy Display was commissioned exclusively for Zoom. It’s not available for licensing or download anywhere. If you want a font that feels similar, Internacional (the base typeface from Latinotype) is the closest public option.

Suisse Int’l, the typeface Almaden Sans is based on, is available through Swiss Typefaces. It’s a paid commercial license, typically running a few hundred dollars depending on usage tier.

On font licensing: always check what’s permitted before using any typeface in client work or commercial products. Free download does not always mean free commercial use, though Lato’s OFL license is genuinely permissive.

What Font Did Zoom Use Before?

Before the September 2022 rebrand, Zoom’s brand relied on Lato as its primary typeface across marketing materials and UI. The logo used the customized Kaleko 205 throughout, which has stayed consistent.

The 2022 rebrand was significant. Zoom had grown from a video conferencing tool into a broader communications platform, and the old visual identity no longer reflected that scope. The company updated its color palette, wordmark weight, product icons, and typography system all at once.

Happy Display and Almaden Sans replaced Lato in brand-level communications, though Lato remained in the desktop and mobile client UI. The wordmark itself was also refined, with character heights corrected for better alignment and a slightly heavier stroke weight added for stronger legibility at small sizes.

Pre-2022, anyone searching for Zoom’s “brand font” would have landed on Lato. That’s still accurate for the interface, but the headline answer has shifted toward Happy Display for anything brand-facing.

What Are the Best Free Alternatives to Zoom’s Fonts?

Since Happy Display and Almaden Sans aren’t publicly available, here are practical alternatives depending on what you’re trying to match:

Inter is probably the most useful swap if you’re building a UI and want something in the spirit of Zoom’s system font. It was designed specifically for screen readability and has become a standard choice in product design. Check out these Inter font pairing ideas if you want to build a full type system around it.

Nunito gets you the rounded, approachable quality of Happy Display without any licensing headaches. It’s not a perfect match, but for display headlines in a friendly brand context, it reads similarly. More Nunito font pairing options are worth exploring if you go that route.

For fonts similar to Lato, Open Sans and Source Sans Pro are the most commonly reached alternatives. Both are free on Google Fonts and carry a comparable open, readable structure.

How to Use Lato in Your Design Projects

In Web Design

Lato is available directly through Google Fonts. Add it to any web project with a single line in the HTML head:

“ <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Lato:wght@300;400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet"> `

Then reference it in CSS:

` body { font-family: 'Lato', sans-serif; } `

For a fallback stack that feels consistent with Zoom’s interface approach: font-family: ‘Lato’, ‘Helvetica Neue’, Arial, sans-serif;

Check out the guide on how to use Google Fonts if you’re new to embedding web fonts.

In Figma and Canva

Figma: Lato is available natively. Search for it in the font picker and it loads from Google Fonts automatically. No installation needed if you’re using the browser version. For the desktop app, make sure the Figma font helper is running.

Canva: Lato is included in Canva’s built-in font library for all plan levels. Just search “Lato” in the font selector.

If you’re working in Photoshop or Illustrator and want to add a font manually, the process is straightforward. Here’s how to add fonts to Photoshop and add fonts to Adobe Illustrator.

For Presentations

Lato works well in presentation tools. It holds legibility at small sizes, which matters when slides get projected or shared as PDFs.

You can add fonts to PowerPoint by installing Lato system-wide first, then selecting it from the font menu.

For Google Slides, the process is slightly different. Here’s the guide on adding fonts to Google Slides.

Why Did Zoom Choose These Fonts?

Lato solved a specific problem in the early years: Zoom needed a typeface that worked across every operating system, screen resolution, and device type without degrading.

Lato’s tall x-height and open apertures mean it stays readable at 12px on a low-DPI laptop screen and equally clear at larger sizes on a 4K monitor. For a platform where users are reading chat messages, navigation labels, and button text simultaneously, that consistency matters a lot.

The 2022 decision to commission Happy Display came from a different need entirely. By that point, Zoom wasn’t just a meeting tool. It was competing with Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Meet across an expanding suite of products. A generic licensed font couldn’t anchor a brand at that scale.

According to Latinotype’s own account of the project, Zoom wanted typography that reflected a “cosmopolitan, self-assured, and close personality.” Happy Display’s organic terminals and bowed letterforms carry a warmth that a strictly geometric or grotesque typeface wouldn’t.

Almaden Sans handles the other end of the scale: dense UI text, technical documentation, product interfaces. It needed to disappear and let the content communicate. Suisse Int’l, the base for Almaden Sans, is a trusted workhorse in that category. Clean, neutral, functional without being cold.

The naming of Almaden Sans is a small detail worth noting. Almaden refers to the street address of Zoom’s San Jose headquarters. It’s the kind of choice that doesn’t show up in press releases but says something about how much thought went into the 2022 rebrand as a whole.

If you’re curious how other platforms in the same space handled their typography decisions, the Skype font and Slack font choices follow a similar logic: prioritize legibility, match the brand’s emotional register, and make sure it scales.

Related font breakdowns worth reading: Notion font, Grammarly font, and what font Airbnb uses.

FAQ on What Font Does Zoom Use

What is the main font Zoom uses in its interface?

Zoom uses Lato as its default UI font across the desktop and mobile client.

It’s a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Łukasz Dziedzic, available free on Google Fonts.

What font does the Zoom logo use?

The Zoom logo uses a custom typeface based on Kaleko 205, modified with rounded edges by Zoom’s brand team.

It’s not a publicly available font. The modifications make it unique to Zoom’s visual identity.

Did Zoom change its font after the 2022 rebrand?

Yes. The 2022 rebrand introduced Happy Display for brand materials and Almaden Sans as the system font.

Lato stayed in the product UI. The new typefaces handle marketing and brand-level communications instead.

Who designed Happy Display for Zoom?

Latinotype, a Chilean type foundry, designed Happy Display in collaboration with Zoom’s internal design team.

It’s based on Latinotype’s Internacional typeface, with custom glyphs and modified terminals built specifically for Zoom.

Is Zoom’s font free to download and use?

Lato is free under the Open Font License and available directly on Google Fonts.

Happy Display and Almaden Sans are proprietary. They’re not available for public download or licensing.

What is Almaden Sans?

Almaden Sans is Zoom’s system font for body copy and UI text, introduced during the 2022 rebrand.

It’s a repackaged version of Suisse Int’l by Swiss Typefaces, renamed after the street where Zoom’s San Jose headquarters sits.

What fonts are similar to Zoom’s typefaces?

For Lato alternatives, try DM Sans or Open Sans. Both are free on Google Fonts with comparable legibility.

For Happy Display, Internacional by Latinotype is the closest match since it’s the original base typeface.

What font does Zoom use for chat messages?

Chat messages in the Zoom client render in Lato, typically at a default display size of 100%.

Users can adjust the chat display size in Accessibility settings, but the typeface itself cannot be changed in the standard client.

How does Zoom’s font compare to Microsoft Teams and Slack?

Microsoft Teams uses Segoe UI, and Slack relies on the Lato sans-serif as well.

All three platforms prioritize screen legibility over personality, though Zoom’s Happy Display pushes further into expressive brand territory than its competitors.

Why did Zoom choose Lato for its interface?

Lato’s tall x-height and open letterforms hold up at small sizes across different screen resolutions and operating systems.

For a platform used on everything from laptops to mobile phones, that cross-device legibility was the deciding factor.

Conclusion

If you’ve been wondering what font does Zoom use, the answer has a few layers: Lato in the client UI, a customized Kaleko 205 in the logo, and Happy Display plus Almaden Sans across brand-level materials since the 2022 rebrand.

Each typeface serves a specific role in Zoom’s visual identity system. None of those choices were accidental.

For most designers, Lato is the practical takeaway. It’s free, screen-optimized, and covers everything from mobile app interfaces to web design with zero licensing friction.

Zoom’s corporate typography shows what thoughtful font selection actually looks like at scale: readable, consistent, and matched to brand personality without overcomplicating the system.

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Bogdan Sandu

Bogdan Sandu is a seasoned designer who has been designing websites since 2008.

Renowned for his expertise in logo design and visual branding, Bogdan has developed a multitude of logos for various clients.

His skills extend to creating posters, vector illustrations, business cards, and brochures. Additionally, Bogdan's UI kits were featured on marketplaces like Visual Hierarchy and UI8.

He also wrote in the past years on sites like Design Your Way, WebDesignerDepot, WPDean, Designmodo, Speckyboy, Slider Revolution, and more.

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