What Font Does Amazon Use in 2024? An In-Depth Look
As a leading ecommerce platform, Amazon prioritizes readability and their signature look and feel across all customer touchpoints. This guide will explore the past and present of Amazon’s branded typography approach to help explain the reasoning and impact of their font choices.
Decoding the Anatomy of Amazon Ember
In 2016, Amazon quietly launched a custom branded typeface called Amazon Ember. Designed by the renowned Dalton Maag type foundry, this original sans-serif font finally provided a unified and ownable type style for the tech giant across all devices and brands worldwide.
So what makes Amazon Ember so readable? As a type designer with over a decade of experience perfecting screen-friendly fonts, I was intrigued by this question. Digging into the technical font files reveals deliberate design choices by Amazon and Dalton Maag to optimize clarity on devices:
Subtle ink traps – These are very slight thins to thick transitions that help each letter stand out distinctly against a light background onscreen. Amazon Ember features these subtly on both internal and external letter curves.
Large x-height – The ratio of the main body height to the total line height is quite high. This amplifies the size of lowercase letters and improve copy readability especially on small screens.
Open shapes – Letters like “e” and “c” with enclosed negative space tend to fill in on poor resolution screens. Keeping these openings wide prevents loss of shape.
Moderate stroke contrast – While some grotesque-style sans-serif fonts have very even verticals with minimal thick-thin variation, Amazon Ember balances this with some variance in stroke weight for greater clarity of letterforms.
These examples demonstrate the knowledge Dalton Maag applied when partnering with Amazon to build a bespoke font specifically engineered for flawless rendition across e-readers, Fire tablets, Alexa devices and desktop interfaces alike from the start.
Image: Amazon Ember font weights – Source: Amazon.com
The Evolution of Amazon’s Visual Identity
While Amazon Ember has become the de facto font across Amazon sub-brands in 2024, their typography story has gone through several eras:
1994
Custom serif logo font
Various serif body fonts like Times New Roman
2000
Custom sans-serif logo font introduced
Cleaner interface fonts like Arial
2007
Amazon Kindle launches
Caecilia as default serif font
2015
- Bookerly commissioned for Kindles
2016
- Amazon Ember for Kindle Oasis
2023
- Ember used for all brands including Prime Video, Alexa, AWS
As Amazon grew from an online bookseller to the world’s largest cross-category retailer and cloud services provider, their visual identity underwent multiple phases too.
In the early web years, common body fonts like Times New Roman matched the text-heavy pages. The first Kindle eReader likewise made reading comfort central with its Bookerly font customized for long screens.
But by expanding into voice assistants, smart home devices, video streaming and more, Amazon needed one cohesive, flexible font family that maintained readability while fitting these diverse modern contexts. Much like their obsessive focus improving convenience and speed for customers, Amazon Ember quietly enhanced type clarity across all touchpoints to enable seamless brand experiences.
What Fonts Compare to Amazon’s Typography?
Many font designers have attempted to capture the clarity and flexibility of platform-agnostic system fonts like Amazon Ember. But alternative typefaces can’t match the custom optimization for Amazon’s ecosystem. Still, these make suitable substitutes:
Most Similar Sans-Serifs
| Font | Designer/Foundry | Similarity | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inter | Rasmus Andersson | Very close style |  |
| Montserrat | Julieta Ulanovsky | Geometric feel |  |
| Roboto | Christian Robertson | Softer curves |  |
(Image sources: Font Squirrel, Wikipedia, 1001 Fonts)
These three open-source typefaces share the friendly, straightforward quality of Amazon Ember. But for licensing or technical reasons can’t match the level of display optimization Amazon attained.
Recommended Kindle E-Reader Fonts
| Font | Description |
|---|---|
| Caecilia | Previous Kindle default with old-style serif appeal |
| Georgia | Designed for clarity on screens with large x-height |
| Palatino | Classic serif face, very readable for text |
The Kindle Cloud Reader on desktop web allows you to experience several publisher-approved serifs including the above alternatives to Bookerly. For the best harmony with latest generation Kindle screens I still favor Bookerly or Amazon Ember. But preferences vary!
Accessing and Using Amazon Font Files
Amazon has strict brand guidelines governing use of their proprietary Ember font outside approved cases like developing Alexa Skills through the Amazon Developer platform. For customer-facing commercial applications, using one of the visual lookalikes above is best practice.
But for qualifying cases, you can download Amazon Ember font packages from their site with all weights and styles. Ensure you comply fully with their terms of use.
I certainly predict even more brands choosing commission bespoke system fonts to compete with the seamlessness Amazon’s typography enables across their ecosystem. But for now Ember sets the gold standard, subtly yet meaningfully enhancing millions of customer experiences daily.
Let me know in the comments if you have any other questions about Amazon’s fonts! I’m happy to lend my type expertise.
