ŁATO
TM
The Lato font family was designed by Łukasz Dziedzic, a Warsaw-based type designer with a number of retail and custom font families to his credit (FF Clan, FF Good, FF Good Headline, FF Mach, FF More, FF Pitu, empik, getin). His friend Adam Twardoch, a font developer and typographic activist, did some technical work on the final font files, some project administration, some writing, and generally tried to keep Łukasz happy. The good folks at the Google Web Fonts lent their support to the project so that the Lato fonts could be released under the SIL Open Font License (which means: they are free now!). Dave Crossland piloted the project and has helped us with his good spirit. All type design and most of the font technical work was done in FontLab Studio 5, Łukasz’s favorite instrument of self-torture. Some TrueType autohinting was done using FreeType ttfautohint by Werner Lemberg.
In the last ten or so years, during which Łukasz has been designing type, most of his projects were rooted in a particular design task that he needed to solve. With Lato, it was no different. Originally, the family was conceived as a set of corporate fonts for a large client — who in the end decided to go in different stylistic direction, so the family became available for a public release. When working on Lato, Łukasz tried to carefully balance potentially conflicting priorities.