
A good test is to read your body or header a few times and see how easy it is for your eye to find the next line. The standard leading is typically 120% of the font size.
Select a value between 0.5 to 3pt – Smaller font sizes are closer 0.5pt and bigger ones are closer to 3ptĪdjusting the line spacing (known as ‘leading’) will help your content flow. Make Sure you are on the Home Ribbon and click on the letter spacing drop-down and select “More Spacing”. The standard spacing options that PowerPoint provides (Tight, Loose, etc.) often feels inadequate because it either makes the spacing too much or too little – so here is how you set your own spacing values: You can also occasionally increase the spacing to create a sense of symmetry, but this will make the text less legible. This wil make your copy more readable – by improving the flow between every character because there is less negative space to interrupt the flow. Generally speaking, we reduce the spacing more for bigger sizes (bringing the characters closer together), and we leave it standard on really small fonts (about 7pt-9pt). In your presentation, you don’t use all those options. That includes all sizes, left, right, center and full justified, headers, blurbs, bold, italic and so on. Standard letter spacing is designed to work best across all scenarios. Setting the letter spacing, (known as ‘tracking’ in professional typography) is the first opportunity to make your system fonts look beautiful. Letter Spacing and Line Spacing should never be standard So let’s look at ten techniques to make system fonts look beautiful and make your presentation NOT SUCK.īONUS: Includes an editable PowerPoint template with samples. There are a few ways and hacks to do this (not going to discuss that here), but what you should know is that none of them is perfect and fault-free. There is another problem with custom fonts, and that is embedding them into your presentations. A presentation with Arial can look better than some overly-designed presentations with their fancy-schmancy custom fonts. A good designer should be able to work with these fonts just as they would have to work with a customer’s CI font. While the standard way in which PowerPoint displays ‘system’ fonts might be perceived as boring, it would be cheap to say your presentation will always look bad if you use Arial or Times New Roman.
You may have heard people say “System fonts are boring!”, “System fonts suck!” and “Never use system fonts again!”.