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How to change your font in Slack

How to change your font in Slack

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Or ‘How I learned to waste time on a Friday with fonts’

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Thanks to this tweet, I learned today how to change what font you see in Slack. And to be honest, I am more than happy to have discovered this on a Friday because I have spent the last hour trying out ridiculous fonts only to realize I didn’t know how to reset it. 

If you want to try this yourself, you can by simply typing /slackfont followed by the name of a font you have locally. Yes, /slackfont Comic Sans MS works. So does /slackfont Wingdings. You need to make sure you’re typing how the font is named for you locally, so /slackfont Comic Sans won’t work; it has to be /slackfont Comic Sans MS. After some quick googling and frantic refreshing of the Twitter thread, I discovered that to reset the default font, you simply type in /slackfont and hit enter.

While it’s fun to play around with, it does make me appreciate the default font Slack uses. It highlights just how much thought goes into making sure the thickness, kerning, and size of a font is optimal for the environment where it’s viewed. Changing the font to any old typeface is a good way to show how a font can actually fail and look bad in an environment, even when it looks great somewhere else.

Here are a few screenshots of my favorites: