10 Best PowerPoint Fonts for Presentation

When you want to create a killer presentation, there are many design decisions to make. One of them is to choose the best fonts. In design, typography is essential for visual and conveying messages. When working on a presentation design project, there are differences between type, typography, typeface, and font:

●       Type is the generic term used for everything that goes into visual text, though it originally refers to the physical embodiment of a character or letter.

●       Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, typeface, and font to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed.

●       Typeface is an individual design of a set of characters, for example, Times, Arial, and Minion.

●       Font is a specific weight, size, and style of a typeface. For example, Arial Black is a font of the Arial typeface. Minion Pro Italic is a font belonging to the Minion font family.

Fonts are letterforms that have been designed to be used in a specific way. They are the graphical representation of text and can be used to convey messages, create visual interest, and convey a sense of style. Fonts are an essential part of any design project as they can be used to create a logo, enhance a brochure, or in this case, set the tone of a presentation.

Before we continue to discuss the best fonts, you should know the basics of typeface, especially the difference between Serif and Sans Serif.

Serif fonts are fonts that have small lines or strokes of the characters and is considered to be more traditional. Well-known Serif fonts include Garamond, Times New Roman, Lucida, and Century.

Sans serif typefaces, on the other hand, are fonts without these small lines or strokes at the ends of characters. Sans serif fonts are often used in digital media because they are easier to read on screen. Well-known Sans Serif Microsoft fonts are Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Verdana, and Helvetica.

10 fonts to make your presentation stand out

What are the best PowerPoint fonts for your presentation? Let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the popular fonts in Microsoft PowerPoint!

1. Calibri

Calibri is one of the most popular Sans Serif fonts after Arial. It is modern, simple, and clear with subtly rounded edges. It features real italics, small caps, and multiple numeral sets. It goes well with casual and non-formal, is easy to read, and looks good on a big screen.

2. Candara

Candara is part of The ClearType Font Collection, a successful collaboration between designers and engineers, to create a font that all begins with the letter C (Constantia, Corbel, Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas).

Candara is a casual humanist Sans Serif font with verticals showing a graceful entasis on stems, high-branching arcades in the lowercase, large apertures in all open forms, and unique ogee curves on diagonals. It is suited for general reports, articles, presentations, and so on. If you are using Microsoft 365 for business, you can use this font for any project you’re working on.

3. Century Gothic

Century Gothic is a Sans-Serif font that has been highly used for advertisement purposes since released by Monotype in 1991. This font contains different characters including Bold, Regular, Italic, Condensed, Bold Italic, etc. Century Gothic has a clean and clear design that makes the small text readable. Therefore, it is used for many purposes such as publishing, advertising, banner, etc.

4. Corbel

Corbel is a modern Sans Serif typeface that is designed to give a clean appearance on screen. The letter forms are open with soft, flowing curves, and lowercase numbers. The spacing also allows for good readability at a distance. Making them looks clear, clean, and functional in small sizes. It is good for serious, technical content, and is highly used for headlines or titles.

5. Garamond

Garamond is one of the oldest fonts, created by famous typeface designer Claude Garamond in the 1500s. This Serif font comes in different styles as well such as Adobe Garamond, Garamond ITC, and Monotype Garamond.

The letters were designed to increase legibility in print, that’s why this font works particularly well in books and lengthy text settings. Therefore, it has been used in all American editions of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games trilogy, and the Shiver Trilogy.

6. Georgia

Georgia is a Serif font that has a classic look because of its thick and thin strokes with tall lowercase features. Making it ideal for presentation because the small-size text is still readable. Georgia is similar to Times New Roman, it was designed by British designer Matthew Carter in the year 1993.

7. Palatino Linotype

This Serif font was designed by German designer Hermann Zapf in 1949. Zapf was influenced by the Italian Renaissance and master calligrapher Giambattista Palatino. Palatino is an invention to solve printing readability problems at that time. So Palatino is carefully crafted to be a highly readable font even on poor-quality paper and printing. These days, Palatino enhanced the quality of its letterform when displayed on the screen. This font is ideal for advertising, and extended text settings such as books, periodicals, and catalogs.

8. Segoe UI

Segoe is a Sans-Serif font that is used as the Microsoft logo and other applications since Microsoft Vista. Monotype developed this font years ago but now it is a trademark of Microsoft. This font is created to improve the visibility and readability of the text. Therefore, different online publications and materials applied this font.

9. Tahoma

Tahoma is one of Microsoft’s new Sans Serif font families that was created to solve the on-screen display problems, especially at small sizes dialog boxes and menus. Tahoma has two TTF types: regular and bold, because it is TTF so they can be rotated and scaled to any size.

Tahoma was designed by Matthew Carter under the guidance of Monotype’s expert Tom Rickner. Tahoma sets new standards in system font design. It is ideal for use in User Interface Scenarios and other situations requiring the presentation of information on the screen.

10. Verdana

Verdana is a Sans-Serif typeface that was designed by British designer Matthew Carter who also designed Georgia, Tahoma, ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand and Shelley scripts, Helvetica Compressed, and many more. The main reason for creating Verdana is the legibility of small screen texts. Because when a presentation is projected on a screen it’s important to keep characters distinct from one another. Research has shown that wider letter spacing helped significantly in reading from the screen.

How to choose fonts for your presentation

The range of fonts on Microsoft PowerPoint can make you overwhelmed about what to choose. When selecting the best fonts for your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, there are a few things to keep in mind:

● Legible and Readable

Legibility and readability are not the same, but they affected each other. Legibility is how a typeface can be identified as characters and words. While readability refers to how easily the audiences read the words and sentences. Therefore, we have to make sure the individual fonts can be distinguished from one another. For example, the shape for the number “1”, and the capital letter “I”, and lowercase letter “l” (1Il); or number “0”, capital “O”, and lowercase “o” (0Oo) in some fonts it can be looked similar.

Since the purpose of a presentation is to deliver an engaging and persuasive presentation that inspires action in the audience, it is important to choose a legible and readable font.

●   Content and tone of the presentation

Every presentation design has a mood and tone. It can be formal or informal, modern or classic, fun or serious. For designers, it is important to consider the brand personality, content, and tone before selecting the appropriate font for the presentation. For example, using Comic Sans on a formal presentation would not be a match. A more formal presentation may require a serif font for a more classic, corporate look.

●   Licensing

Some fonts have general licenses that allow for any situation, including promotional, but others don’t. For Microsoft PowerPoint, it mentioned in their document “Unless you are using an application that is specifically licensed for home, student, or non-commercial use, we do not restrict you from making logos using Windows-supplied fonts.”

To avoid legal issues in using fonts, every designer should be sure they understand the licensing of any fonts they’re considering using and what copyright those licenses might have. Because several fonts allow use in promotional materials but not for use on a product being sold (commercial use).

●   Multi-platform font

Not all fonts are set to be used in multi-platform because each operating system comes with a different set of default fonts. A presentation is not just shown in front of the audience, sometimes it is emailed or printed out for editing or viewing individually. Therefore, choose “safe fonts” that remain consistent whether you open it on a Mac, PC, or mobile version. For example, Arial, Calibri, Century Gothic, and Tahoma are common to all platforms.

Conclusion

Choosing fonts for a presentation can be stressful because there are dozens of them in Microsoft Font Library alone. Many people spend hours trying to figure out the best font for their important pitching project or just using the same font over and over again. The right fonts can make a great design, while the wrong one can break it.

Well, even though there are no “exact rules” on picking fonts for slides, the overall project itself will influence your options. However, if the objective of the presentation is highly important for your business, we recommend you use a presentation design agency (like us 😊).

In Article 36, before we start designing there’ll be a presentation guideline. This includes the use of fonts, general design, grid system, animation, and transition rules. By making this very detailed, you can rest assured that all presentations in the future will be designed in the same, beautiful style. Go through our work and contact us for a free consultation.

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