While Instagram lets you use nine different fonts in your stories, you’re stuck with a single boring sans serif for your profile details, regular post captions, and comments. Here’s how you can side-step the limitations and spice things up.
How Custom Instagram Fonts Work
Instagram uses the font Proxima Nova for small text like comments and captions. There’s no way to change that, but you can kind of get around it.
To work with different alphabets, punctuation marks, scripts, and emoji, Instagram also supports most Unicode scripts. While these include things like mathematical operators (÷), Greek symbols used in science (Ω), and Hebrew letters (א), they also include some basic letter styles, like 𝒶 𝒽𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓌𝓇𝒾𝓉𝓉𝑒𝓃 𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝓅𝓉, 𝔞 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠 𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢, and ⓛⓔⓣⓣⓔⓡⓢ ⓘⓝ ⓒⓘⓡⓒⓛⓔⓢ. Different glyphs can even be combined to make things like an upside-down font (ʇuoɟ uʍop ǝpısdn uɐ) and ฬђคՇєשєг ץ๏ย ςคɭɭ Շђเร.
(It should be clear that How-To Geek also supports Unicode!)
So now that you know what’s going on, let’s look at how to easily use these fake fonts on Instagram.
How to Add Funky Fonts to Your Captions and Bios
While some Unicode characters can be entered using a regular keyboard, if you want to do more than substitute a + sign for a “t”, it’s easier to copy and paste from an app.
On your smartphone, visit CoolFont.org and enter your caption or comment. It’ll present you with around 100 different text options, ranging from the cool to the barely legible. Tap the “Decorate” button if you want to add additional text decorations like hearts, stars, and random patterns.
Once you’re happy with the way the text looks, select it and tap “Copy,” or just tap the “Copy” button. You can then paste it into any text field in Instagram.
It’ll even work with Instagram stories, but it probably won’t look as good as the built-in options.
You can use this same technique to add fun fonts to other social media sites that support Unicode like Twitter and Facebook. Just be careful: You want to make sure whatever you write is still easy to read.
