5 Tips for Making Right PowerPoint Fonts

New to PowerPoint? Confused at choosing fonts for your presentation? Here are some tips on PowerPoint fonts.

1. Know the fonts

The first thing is to know which fonts are proper for your presentation and audience. Font category includes 3 pairs: formal and informal, display and content, serif and sans serif.

  • a. For formal occasions like corporate press release where the audience are upper management staff, you should take formal look fonts like Times Roman. For informal occasions with entertainment, usu. where include little kids, go a little wilder with the fonts, e.g. Comic San MS.
  • b. Display fonts are showy, flashy, with extreme looking, often used where there is little text to be read and the idea is to catch the audience’s attention. However, for blocks of text you should use content fonts, which are easy to read, clear at any size, helpful for moving your eye through the material.
  • c. Serif fonts have little feet on each character, e.g. Times New Roman. Fonts that don’t have these lines are called sans serif fonts, e.g. Arial. Use serif fonts for long blocks of text as the feet helps your eye move from one character to the next, linking them together in your brain. In contrast, use sans serif fonts for short phrases like titles and labels.
  • PowerPoint fonts PowerPoint Font

    2. Stick to the fonts

    Pick the three or four fonts that you want to use in your presentation and stick to them. Here, less is more. A few fonts will make it easier for the audience to catch clues on what you are conveying.
    Font ideas:

  • Main content font: Bookman family, Garamond, Century Schoolbook.
  • Titles, labels, and captions: Be a little less formal than the content font. E.g., Arial, Tunga, Tahoma, Trebuchet.
  • Display font: use it if you are going to grab the audience’s attention. Depends on your preference.
  • 3. Bigger is better

    Never keep your PowerPoint fonts too small. Whether you are presenting live to a group of a thousand or creating a kiosk to be run one person at a time, remember not to make fonts too small. Or, the characters won’t be seen by the entire audience. Generally, keep title lines greater than 42 points and the text 36 point or larger. Regular slide text should never be smaller than a 16-point character. Labels and captions should never be smaller than 14-point. Words such as "Announcing", "Presenting", "New", and other eye-catchers should always be at least 32-point. My suggestion for title fonts in PowerPoint is running at 60 points if possible.

    4. Bold fonts as possible

    It’s good to use bold fonts in PowerPoint, particularly when you use PC to TV converters since these devices may drop out portions of letters due to interpolation. Bold fonts will give more width and density to letter shapes, and thus improve legibility. People seldom use all bold fonts on a webpage or a printed document; but it is OK to consider using ALL bold fonts in presentations.

    5. Concern your audience

    Not everyone can see well, especially older folks and those who have vision problems. If you use all bold fonts as mentioned in Tip 2, then what do you do when you need to emphasize some texts? There’re alternatives. Use a different color for the font, italicize the text or underline it. You can even combine all three. You are not limited to black and white printed text, color can be a powerful tool – use it!

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