Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed, cloud native business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy to create and deliver insights to everyone in your organization. You can make your data come to life with rich interactive charts and create beautiful dashboards and reports to share with thousands of users, either directly within a QuickSight application, or embedded in web applications and portals.
We’re excited to introduce font customization in QuickSight, a feature that significantly enhances dashboard clarity, engagement, and accessibility. With this new capability, authors gain precise control over typography for each specific visual property. You can set font sizes in pixels, choose colors and font families, and apply styles such as bold, italic, and underline.
Why font customization matters
“Typography plays a crucial role in effective data visualization. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about enhancing readability, guiding attention, and reinforcing your brand identity.”
Effective font customization is a cornerstone of clear communication, playing a vital role in how your audience perceives and interacts with data. By offering granular control over font size, color, and style, QuickSight now empowers you to significantly enhance the readability of your dashboards. This improvement is particularly crucial for meeting organizational accessibility requirements, making sure your insights are digestible for all users, including those with visual impairments. Moreover, thoughtful font choices allow you to create visual hierarchies that naturally guide viewers through your data narrative, highlighting key insights and improving overall comprehension. The ability to align your typography with your brand identity adds another layer of professionalism to your reports, fostering trust and recognition. Ultimately, these customization options enable you to craft more engaging, inclusive, and effective dashboards that not only display data but truly communicate it, supporting better decision-making across your organization.
Best practices for font customization
As you explore these new features, keep the following in mind:
- Consistency is key – Maintain a cohesive look across your dashboards
- Prioritize readability – Choose fonts and sizes that work across devices
- Use a visual hierarchy – Guide your audience’s attention with thoughtful font choices
- Test across devices – Make sure your customizations look great on all screen sizes
Solution overview
The following figure illustrates some of the differences in font customization now available.
From a simple dropdown with t-shirt-based font sizes (small, medium, large, extra large), you will now notice a new text styling component for the following visual and chart-specific properties:
- Tables and pivot tables:
- Tables – Headers, cells, and totals
- Pivot tables – Headers, cells, subtotals, and totals for both rows and columns
- Visual properties:
- Legends – Both title and individual items
- Titles and subtitles – Precise font size control in pixels
Let’s explore how to apply these new font customization features across different visual types in QuickSight. The following sections will guide you through the process for each visual element, helping you make the most of these powerful new controls.
Customize fonts for tables and pivot tables
For tables and pivot tables, you now have granular control over headers, cells, subtotals, and totals:
- On the table visual, choose Format Visual to access properties.
- Expand the Headers section to find the new Text styling options.
- Choose from a range of font types and precise pixel sizes.
- Apply similar customizations to cells and totals sections.
The following screenshot shows an example of a table before customization.
The following screenshot shows an example of font customization in a pivot table.
Customize font size for all visual titles and subtitles
Besides font customization with tables and pivot tables, there are new enhanced chart customization capabilities by moving beyond traditional size presets to precise pixel-based font sizing. Authors can now fine-tune chart titles and subtitles with exact font sizes (10–128 pixels), enabling pixel-perfect visual control for your dashboards.
This enhancement offers greater flexibility and precision in dashboard design, helping you create exactly the look you envision. The following example show how titles and subtitles have formatting options, applied giving dashboard authors unprecedented control over their visual storytelling to capture the audience’s attention and reinforce the brand’s identity.
Customize fonts for visual legends
Likewise, chart legends can be transformed from basic labels to powerful visual elements. The new customization suite gives unprecedented control over every aspect of your legends:
- Pixel-perfect sizing – Choose exact font sizes (10–48 pixels) for both legend titles and items
- Rich text formatting – Apply bold, italic, and underline styles
- Custom color selection – Use perfect color matching for your brand identity
This precision control means that legends aren’t just labels—they’re integral parts of data story, perfectly balanced with your visualizations. Whether you’re creating executive dashboards or client-facing reports, these enhanced formatting options help you achieve professional-grade visual hierarchy and brand consistency across all your analytics. The following screenshot is an example of the steps to apply font customization on legends.
Conclusion
These new font customization enhancements mark a significant step forward in the capabilities of QuickSight, offering you pixel-perfect control over your dashboard’s visual narrative. Whether you’re working with charts, tables, or pivot tables, you now have greater control over every text element in your dashboards and reports.
We’re excited to see how you’ll use these new features to elevate your dashboards and reports. Start exploring today, and take your QuickSight dashboards to the next level!
To learn more about these and other new features, visit our QuickSight Community’s What’s New section. Happy visualizing!
About the authors
Bhupinder Chadha is a senior product manager for Amazon QuickSight focused on visualization and front end experiences. He is passionate about BI, data visualization and low-code/no-code experiences. Prior to QuickSight he was the lead product manager for Inforiver, responsible for building a enterprise BI product from ground up. Bhupinder started his career in presales, followed by a small gig in consulting and then PM for xViz, an add on visualization product. Ashok Dasineni is a Solutions Architect for Amazon QuickSight. Before joining AWS, Ashok worked with clients and organizations in Banking and financial domain, focusing on fraud research and prevention. He designed and implemented innovative solutions to improve business process, reduce cost and increase revenue, enabling companies around the world to achieve their highest potential through data. Neeraj Kumar is a Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon QuickSight, AWS’ cloud-native, fully managed BI service. Neeraj started his career as software engineer building software applications for automotive, manufacturing and telecom companies, he further progressed as specialist and while working at Cognizant he was responsible for designing and developing end-to-end Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions for major Insurance companies.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/business-intelligence/elevate-your-dashboards-with-font-customization-in-amazon-quicksight/