Google Fonts: Why They’re Great for Presentations

While often overlooked in presentation designs, fonts can make the difference between an average, boring presentation and an elevated, professional presentation. So, how can you add flavor to your presentation design with your font choices?

Start by checking out the standard fonts available in PowerPoint. Fortunately, the provided fonts, Microsoft Standard fonts, can practically be used across all computers. Unfortunately, Powerpoint’s font library offers only a limited number of fonts. The limited number of fonts available can quickly get boring, and therefore result in a lackluster presentation design.

Of course, when creating a PowerPoint presentation, you can also use any font you’ve installed on your computer. However, be warned that your chosen font may or may not work on other computers. So, for example, if you arrive at a conference with your PowerPoint presentation saved on a flash drive, or in the cloud, you might encounter technical issues if you try to open your presentation on the laptop provided by the conference. More specifically, your selected fonts might not function if you chose fonts outside of the PowerPoint font library. If that is the case, Powerpoint will substitute your selected font for another font such as Arial or Times New Roman and your text formatting will get out of whack quickly. This automatic font adjustment can transform a presentation you labored over for days into a presentation that looks like it was thrown together in 5 minutes. Obviously this would be bad news for you.

Yes, you can avoid this problem with a variety of solutions, such as saving your presentation as a PDF. However, sometimes you might need to save your presentation as a standard PowerPoint file, and therefore you cannot utilize some of the workaround options available.

So, here’s another solution for you: use Google Fonts.

Google Fonts is an online library of open source fonts, optimized for digital use.

The primary and promoted use of Google Fonts is the web. Google Fonts allows you to select the fonts you want, and compile them into a collection. Then, you are able to generate a HTML or Javascript code that you can insert into your webpage. This allows you to easily and quickly use any of the fonts from your collection on your web page.

However, Google Fonts is not just for web use. You are also offered the option to download any of the fonts for use on your personal computer. Since Google Fonts are all open source, you can use the fonts in any manner you see fit. This means, you can use them in your presentation designs.

All Google fonts are well-designed and high-quality. Of course, some fonts will work better for certain designs than others, but you won’t find a Comic Sans in the bunch.

There are 3 main benefits to using Google Fonts to broaden your typography horizons when designing a presentation.

1. In the Google Fonts library you can access a large selection of professional grade fonts that will suit pretty much any presentation need you might have. As previously mentioned, the fonts are all open source so you don’t have to worry about paying for the fonts, or any other licensing issues.

2. Google Fonts are always downloadable from the web, so if you do arrive at a conference and the laptop you’re using does not have the font you need, you can easily jump on the Google Fonts website, and download a font to install it.

3. The fonts are all optimized for the web, which means digital viewing. Since (hopefully) you have stopped printing your presentation slides, and instead share your presentations via the Internet, web optimized fonts are a valuable asset for you, and all modern presenters.

Web optimized fonts allow for enhanced readability and performance on-screen. These optimizations usually include a taller x-height (the distance between the baseline of a line of type and tops of the main body of lower case letters (i.e. excluding ascenders or descenders), wider letterforms, open counters (the area of a letter that is entirely or partially enclosed by a letter form), heavier thin strokes and serifs, reduced stroke contrast, and modified curves and angles. These modifications allow the viewer to more quickly and easily read your text on screen.

digital font presentation design

Conclusion: When designing your next presentation, avoid any technical issues by selecting your fonts wisely. If the limited fonts available in PowerPoint are negatively impacting your design potential, try using Google Fonts instead. Your presentation design will improve, and you will not risk any technical problems on the big day of your presentation.

Resources:

How To Choose Fonts For Presentation Design

How to Install Fonts

How to Choose a Font





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