lato

Lato is a sans-serif typeface family designed by Polish designer Łukasz Dziedzic and released in 2010. The name derives from the Polish word lato, meaning summer, reflecting a warm, friendly tone. Lato was created to be transparent and readable in both body text and display settings.

The font is distributed under the SIL Open Font License, allowing free use for personal and commercial projects. The family includes multiple weights from 100 (Thin) to 900 (Black) with matching italic variants, enabling versatile typographic systems. It was designed with attention to both corporate and web typography, offering good legibility on screen and in print, with a relatively wide x-height and restrained letterforms that balance warmth and clarity.

Lato achieved wide adoption after its inclusion in Google Fonts, where developers and designers can easily deploy it in websites. It has been used in branding, user interfaces, editorial design, and open-source projects. The design has been praised for its neutrality and personality, making it a practical choice for multilingual text due to broad character support.