PowerPoint Design Trend – Hand Made Fonts
Graphic designers are using hand made fonts in their print and multi-media materials. This is a trend that I’ve started to use in slide design.
What I like about it
There is something about a hand made font that makes a presentation come alive. I don’t know if it’s the freshness that helps us forget about stale corporate fonts that we’re required to use in most of our presentations or if it’s what I can only describe as the “motion” that these fonts bring to a slide. It’s an organic sort of motion verses traditional PowerPoint animation.
Why they could spell disaster
- They might not be readable. Some of the funkier fonts are difficult to decipher — just like some people’s handwriting.
- Your corporate template requires the use of approved fonts.
- Not all fonts are embeddable in PowerPoint. So, if you plan on sharing your presentation with someone else — on another computer — your hand made font may not travel with your presentation. And lord knows what it will default to when someone else opens it. To learn all you can about using fonts in PowerPoint, read this book, Building PowerPoint Templates. It’s written by the experts in PowerPoint template design, Julie Terberg and Echo Swinford.
Takeaway
Use them if you can. Make sure the text is readable against your slide background. Know what you company’s rules are for using fonts in presentations and make sure your font is sharable with other.