Having trouble deciding on the best font style for your PowerPoint presentation? Along with matching your brand, style, and mission, you want a font that’s easy to read and attractive at the same time.
We’ll explain each available font type, the best fonts to use in PowerPoint, and some helpful suggestions for picking a font for your slideshow.
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Types of font styles
Before you review the top PowerPoint fonts, it’s important to learn about the different types of fonts for those that best match your presentation. You’ll find a variety of font types available in Microsoft PowerPoint.
Serif fonts
One of the most common types is the serif font. You’ll notice that the letters for this font have small lines or strokes projecting from the edges giving them a traditional appearance. This makes the font ideal for printed pieces because distinguishing the letters from one another is easy.
Common serif fonts:
- Times New Roman
- Georgia
- Garamond
- Cambria
- Palatino Linotype
Sans-serif fonts
Another common type is the sans-serif font. You’ll see these letters without (“sans” in French) serifs or projections giving them a modern appearance. This makes the font type clearer to read in digital media because the lines and edges are distinct.
Common sans-serif fonts:
- Arial
- Tahoma
- Roboto
- Verdana
- Calibri
Script fonts
For a font with a handwritten appearance, you’ll see script fonts. These appear as a cursive or calligraphy style. While these fonts are elegant and attractive, they can be difficult to read in large quantities, so limiting this font to a word or phrase is usually best.
Common script fonts:
- Brush Script
- Pacifico
- French Script
- Monotype Corsiva
- Lucida Calligraphy
Monospaced fonts
Monospaced fonts resemble sans-serif fonts in their clean lines. The difference is that the letters are evenly spaced horizontally, so each letter uses the same amount of room. You’ll often see this type used for code snippets.
Common monospaced fonts:
- Courier
- Consolas
- Lucida Console
- Lucida Sans Typewriter
- Menlo
Display fonts
One more font type to check out is the display font. This style can include or even combine the above types and is considered decorative. It is designed for large copy like titles, headings, or pull quotes on posters, logos, and book covers.
Common display fonts:
- Bauhaus
- Broadway
- Cooper Black
- Curlz
- Jokerman
Best fonts for PowerPoint
With the above font types in mind, let’s look at several of the best PowerPoint fonts for your next presentation. We’ve included a bit of a mix to help you find the perfect style for your brand and mission.
Tahoma
Tahoma is a sans-serif font created by Matthew Carter that’s very close in appearance to Arial. As Microsoft mentions, “it was created to address the challenges of on-screen display” and because the font can be scaled and rotated easily, it’s a solid choice for any presentation.
Calibri
Calibri is another popular pick and is still the default font for blank presentations in some versions of PowerPoint. This is also a sans-serif font with slightly rounded edges, giving it a warm and soft appearance.
Verdana
Maybe you like the sans-serif font type but want something a bit larger without taking up more room. Verdana is a good choice. The letters appear “spread out” more than a font like Arial, without taking up extra slide space. And the font type still provides clean lines and edges.
Georgia
If a serif font matches your brand and you want to add some contrast, consider using Georgia for titles and headings. While similar to Times New Roman, Georgia has a somewhat more modern appearance while still maintaining the traditional feel of serif fonts. Georgia also works well for emphasis formatting like italics and bold.
Monotype Corsiva
Looking for a script font for certain portions of text like the “welcome” or “thank you” slide? Monotype Corsiva is an elegant option that’s still easy to read. While it provides the slanted handwritten feel, the letters don’t flow into each other like many script fonts.
Tips for selecting PowerPoint fonts
When you’re ready to start selecting the fonts for your presentation, here are a few suggestions to keep in mind.
Pick fonts that are easy to read. You don’t want your audience struggling to read or even squinting at your slides to distinguish the letters and words in your content.
Limit the number of font styles. While using different font types works well for titles, headings, and body text, if you use too many, it can be distracting to the viewer. It may also invoke the feeling of an unorganized presentation or one that was rushed during the creation process.
Apply a bit of contrast. When you have text that you want to stand out, using the same font style as the rest of the text doesn’t accomplish this. While it may seem odd to use serif fonts for titles and sans-serif fonts for body text, this contrast can work quite well if used wisely!
Keep the fonts consistent. Once you choose the fonts for your slideshow, continue to use that collection throughout the entire presentation. For example, apply the same font style to each slide title or heading. Not only will the slides look polished, but you’ll present a professional and organized slideshow.
Consider the font when collaborating. If you’re working on the slideshow with others, try to use fonts available to them --- on the device and platform where they use PowerPoint. This can eliminate confusion or even errors when creating the appearance of the presentation. When in doubt, you can embed the fonts when saving and sharing the slideshow.
Use Plus AI to insert slides
Along with making the right font choices for your PowerPoint text, you can ease the burden of other design and content decisions using Plus AI.
Plus AI for PowerPoint is a handy add-on that helps you not just create presentations, but edit them as well. Using our example image at the top of the article, we used Plus AI to create the slide you see. We simply instructed the tool to insert a slide that shows our five font types and picked a layout to match the existing template.
As you can see, Plus AI provided the slide, eliminating extra research. We then simply updated it a bit to add some examples. All of this took only minutes!
Visit the Plus AI website for a full feature set, the template gallery, and more. You can start your free trial and begin saving time on your next PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation.
