Instagram's brand typeface is Instagram Sans, but the text you read in the app, your bio and captions and comments included, is drawn in your phone's own system font: San Francisco on iPhone, Roboto on most Android phones. You can't change either one.
What you can change is the characters you type. That's how people get bold, cursive or gothic letters in a bio, and it's covered below.
Three things people mean by "Instagram's font"
- The brand font. Instagram Sans is a custom typeface Instagram introduced in 2022 with the type studio Colophon Foundry. It appears in the logo, ads and marketing. In August 2026 Instagram refreshed its brand and added two more typefaces, Instagram Pen (a handwriting face) and Instagram Mono.
- The app's text. Inside the app, most text follows the phone. It's San Francisco on iPhone and Roboto on most Android phones, which is why Instagram looks slightly different on each.
- The Stories styles. When you add text to a Story or Reel, Instagram offers its own set of looks. At the time of writing they include Classic, Modern, Neon, Typewriter and Strong. The names and the list change between app updates.
Most people asking the question mean the second one, usually because they want to match it in a graphic or work out why their text looks different from a friend's. The answer is that it's the phone, not the account.
Why you can't change the font in your bio
A bio is a plain text box. It stores letters and nothing else: no bold button, no font menu, no size. Whatever you type is drawn in the viewer's system font, so two people looking at the same bio can see slightly different letter shapes.
What does work: styled characters
Unicode, the standard that every phone uses to store text, includes whole alphabets of lookalike letters. Bold, italic, script and gothic forms exist as separate characters, originally made for mathematics. Because they're characters, not formatting, Instagram stores and shows them like any other text.
- Type your name or tagline into a font generator and pick a style.
- Copy it. Tap copy on the style you like.
- Paste it into Edit profile. Both the Name and Bio fields accept it. Save.
Your username can't be styled. It only takes plain letters, numbers, periods and underscores.
Before you restyle the whole profile
- Style one line, not all of it. A styled name or a short tagline looks sharp. Three lines of cursive turns into a blur at the size Instagram shows a bio.
- Search may not match. Styled letters are different characters from plain ones, so someone searching for your plain name may not find a styled one. Keep your username plain.
- Screen readers struggle. Some read each styled letter as a maths symbol, or skip it. Keep it to a few words.
- Some phones show boxes. An older phone may lack a glyph and draw an empty square. Check how it looks on a second phone if you can.
For Stories and Reels, skip all of this
The text tool in Stories and Reels has its own styles, and they don't need a generator. Tap the text tool and swipe through the options. The generator is for the places Instagram gives you no such button: your name, your bio and the caption under a post.
Where to go from here
- Font generator type once, copy a style, paste it into your bio
- Fancy text generator for names and short taglines
- Bold, italic and strikethrough on WhatsApp for the app where formatting does have codes