What? Really… Fonts?
If we are going to put effort into developing high-impact slides, and we need to have some text on our slides, it’s worth knowing a thing or two about fonts.
of Serifs…
Fonts basically come in two types – Serif and Sans-Serif. The “serifs” are the little flourishes that are added to various letters as shown in red on this graphic from the Wikipedia entry for Sans-Serif fonts.
The back story is that these elements area added to help our eyes track along a line of text on a page packed with text. This is why most paper books and news papers are printed with serif fonts, and this is a good thing.
But your slide deck (hopefully) is nothing like a novel, so there is no need to help the audience read long lines of text, so we stick with non-Serif fonts, such as Arial, Helvetica Trebuchet Sans or any of the zillion or so other fonts that can be found.
Consistency
Ok, I’m about to drop some links to font archives, but I have to preface that with a request: be consistent. For 99% of the text in your slides, use a readily available Sans-Serif font. Use these other font’s if you are adding “word-art” for some effect beyond what you can do with a more “standard font”
Find some Fonts
Possibly the mother load, with 157,939 fonts available as of writing this article. This is a commercial site, and it really shows. Very clean design, with a smooth interactive “find a font” experience. They also have some useful links such as this article on Type 101.
This site has a tremendous selection of fonts – 8675 currently listed – with various licensing requirements. I really like this site – it’s clean, and looks like it’s professionally run. Each font is shown at a pretty large size. They are also well tagged to it’s easy to find what you are looking for.
This site specializes in… well… abstract fonts. These are good for adding particular artistic touches to images.
This site has a list of 6500 fonts, but they simply organized by name – not very handy when you are looking for something specific.
