Install FontSwap
A slide is read from three metres away by someone who is half-listening. That single constraint eliminates most of typography.
The shortlist
| Font | Best for | Weights | Variable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inter | Default choice, data slides | 100–900 | Yes |
| Source Sans 3 | Dense decks, cross-platform | 200–900 | Yes |
| Manrope | Modern brand decks | 200–800 | Yes |
| Figtree | Friendly, startup pitches | 300–900 | Yes |
| Montserrat | Big statement headlines | 100–900 | Yes |
| Lora | Serif accent, quotes | 400–700 | Yes |
The two rules that outrank font choice
Weight contrast, not size contrast. A headline at 44pt Regular and body at 24pt Regular reads as one undifferentiated block from the back of a room. The same headline at SemiBold or Bold separates instantly. Variable fonts make this cheap — you have every weight from one file, so use 600 for heads and 400 for body rather than scaling everything up.
Never below 24pt. Not for footnotes, not for source citations, not for axis labels. If it doesn’t fit at 24pt, it belongs in the appendix or the handout, not on the slide. This is the single most-violated rule in business presentations and the easiest to fix.
Everything else is secondary. A deck set in Arial that follows both rules beats a deck set in a beautiful typeface that follows neither.
Picking one
Inter is the default I’d give anyone who asks. Tall x-height, wide range, tabular numerals for data slides, and it renders identically on every platform your deck might open on. It is not exciting. Decks are not the place to be exciting with the body font.
Source Sans 3 is the choice when the deck is dense and will be read on a laptop as often as projected — its hinting and optical size axis handle small sizes better than anything else here.
Manrope and Figtree both read as contemporary and slightly warm. Good for pitch decks where the deck itself is part of the impression. Manrope is the more geometric of the two; Figtree the friendlier.
Montserrat at 800 or 900 makes an excellent statement slide — one number, one claim, full bleed. It’s less good as a body font across forty slides.
For a serif accent — pull quotes, testimonials, a section divider — Lora has enough weight in its strokes to survive projection. Avoid high-contrast display serifs entirely: hairlines vanish on a projector.
The export problem
This is where most font choices actually fail.
PowerPoint and Keynote embed fonts inconsistently across platforms, and Google Slides only offers its own library. If you hand a .pptx to a client who doesn’t have your font installed, their machine substitutes something and your layout reflows — usually mid-presentation, in front of the people you were trying to impress.
Three defences, in order of reliability:
- Export to PDF. Fonts are embedded, layout is frozen. This is the only genuinely safe handoff.
- Use a Google Font. Every font in the table above is on Google Fonts, so a recipient can install it in a minute if they need to edit.
- Embed on export. PowerPoint on Windows can embed fonts in the file (File → Options → Save → Embed fonts). It’s unreliable on macOS and doesn’t survive round-trips.
If the deck must stay editable by someone else, use a font they’ll have. That usually means the boring answer, and the boring answer is correct.
Contrast on a projector
Projectors wash out. A colour combination that passes contrast checks on your monitor can be unreadable in a lit room.
- Dark text on light backgrounds survives ambient light better than the reverse
- If you use a dark deck, push body text to pure white rather than a grey
- Avoid thin weights entirely on projected slides — 300 and below disappears
- Test on the actual room’s projector if the stakes justify it
FAQ
What size should slide body text be? 24pt minimum, 28–32pt comfortable. Headlines 40–54pt. If your content doesn’t fit, the content is the problem.
Can I use two fonts in a deck? Yes — one for headings, one for body, and stop there. A third font is almost always a mistake. Or use one variable family at two weights, which is cleaner and lighter.
Do I need tabular numerals?
On any slide with a table or aligned figures, yes. font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums in web-based decks; in PowerPoint it’s under the font’s OpenType options and most people never find it, which is why columns of numbers so often look ragged.
Which font for a deck that will be printed as a handout? Source Sans 3 or a text serif like Lora. Print tolerates smaller sizes and finer strokes than projection does, so a handout can carry more detail than the slide it came from.