History

The humanist sans-serif font Lato was created by Łukasz Dziedzic in 2010. Dziedzic created the font for a Polish bank, but when they decided not to use the font, he saved the typeface only to release it under the libre SIL Open Font License later in the same year. In 2013-2014, the Lato font family was expanded with the addition of many glyphs and it now supports more than 100 Latin-based languages. Lato was also published on Google Fonts in 2010, where it grew greatly in popularity, and it is now the fourth most popular font on Google Fonts. Lato has 9 weights, hairline, thin, light, regular, medium, semibold, bold, heavy, and black. It also offers an italic version.

Design and Uses

Dziedzic used “classical proportions” which gave the font elegance and harmony, while also making the font sleek. Lato’s details are semi-rounded, which also add to the font's warmth while still maintaining a serious structure. When designing the font, Dziedzic wanted to design a typeface that would be “transparent” and easy to read when used in body text but would also be unique when used in a larger size such as headers or titles. Generally, Lato can be used in many different ways, as a body text, display text, and more.

Canvas

Canvas, a website used by many schools and students, is one of the many popular sites that uses Lato. Canvas actually uses Lato for almost all type on the website including headers, body text, subtitles, and many more. I think Canvas uses Lato effectively, although because it is used for everything on the website, it tends to look very monotonous, so I think that exploring different fonts to mix with Lato for other components such as navigation or headers could be beneficial.

Goodreads

Goodreads is another website that uses Lato. Goodreads is a very popular website where readers can search for new books to read, write reviews for books they have already read, and look for or share book recommendations. Goodreads uses Lato for most of their content on the home page. But on the individual book pages, it is used much scarcely, as some header, navigation, or text on buttons. It is used alongside the serif font Merriweather, which is mainly used as the body font. I think that Goodreads uses Lato effectively, I like how they mixed a serif font and a sans-serif font, the balance that they use for both manages to look clean and well-designed.

My Overall Opinion

I don’t have any big dislikes about Lato. I actually like it as a font, it is a very clean and easy-to-read font, and I think it works well as body text and display text. Although I may have a small personal grudge against it because it is used with Canvas for all things school-related, as a font it works well in many designs and is a clean and neat looking font.