Ah yes, the font…

Never has something so small created such grand disasters for so many. It may seem trivial, but when it comes to incorporating text into your slides font is everything. The size and style of the lettering you choose for your presentation can make your presentation take wing or make it crash and burn.

There is a reason why we’re not all graphic designers. Choosing great fonts can be question of taste, but there are a lot of basics that anyone can – and should – learn before deciding to fill slides with loads of words that no one can read.

Here are 5 font tips you definitely need to refer to before your next presentation:

Stand Out
It may seem obvious, but the most common mistake people make when choosing fonts is picking a style or color that blends into the background of their slides. Don’t do this! Your fonts need to standout from the body of your slides.

Don’t Get Fancy
Although I would love to see someone use some insanely baroque font and really make it work, most of us should stick to the basics when it comes to font styles. Keep it simple!

Same Same Same
Don’t mix up a number of font styles. I understand the need for more than one, but if you find yourself using three or more, you may be flirting with a readability disaster.

To Serif or Not to Serif
A serif is the little tail that appears on various letters in different font styles. When you are using a lot of text, serifs make for easy reading. That’s why most magazines and papers use them. However, lots of text is a fundamental no-no for PowerPoint presentations and I recommend sticking with basic “sans serif” fonts.

For example:

Times New Roman is a font with serifs.

Arial is a font without (sans) serifs.

Don’t Capitalize on Your Message

We’ve all seen slides where a presenter has insisted on CAPITALIZING EVERY WORD IN THEIR MESSAGE.

Isn’t that annoying?

When a presenter capitalizes unnecessarily it is as troublesome as mixing up too many font styles. The text becomes difficult to read and we quickly begin to lose track of - and interest in – the offending PowerPoint presentation. If you need to draw attention to a statement or a headline consider using bold text or even italics, but don’t overdo those either.

When it comes to fonts, less is more. Don’t agonize. Make it big and make it readable. Remember, this is a presentation, not a book!

About the Author: Scott Schwertly is an epic storyteller.  Today, he owns and operates Ethos3 Communications, a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.

He may live in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs, but he calls San Diego home – the place of his beloved San Diego Chargers.  Scott has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University.

Every time we turn on the news lately, it seems we are confronted by one tremendous challenge after another: health care reform, finance regulations, real estate reform. Somewhere in the middle of all this noise, issues regarding the environment are still fighting for our attention and making a case that the circumstances involving the air we breathe and the water we drink should be our top priorities.

Although so-called “green” issues have taken a backseat to economic woes lately, the two really go hand-in-hand. After all, aren’t we all more frugal in our homes and at work than we may have been only a year ago. Ultimately, this is probably a good thing, but it can pose challenges at your next presentation.

When it comes to keeping your presentation green, you have two things to gain: First of all, you are doing the right thing and being a good steward of your world by not wasting energy and resources just because you’ve simply been too lazy to research alternatives. Secondly, you are racking up the cool points. Lets face it, green is in fashion and the presenter with the smallest carbon footprint will find that they are basking in a verdant glow of hip and happening at their next face-to-face. Plus, greening up your presentation doesn’t have to get too complicated. With just a few tweaks and a little common sense, your next presentation will be hugging trees!

Unplugged
This is one of the most obvious solutions for “greening” your next pitch. The fact is, many of us already rely too much on our PowerPoint and not enough on engaging our audience. By limiting the amount of time you devote to your computer and projector you will save energy and preserve your batteries, bulbs and gear. Chances are you’ll also put yourself in the position to become a much better, more personal presenter.

Employ Soy
One place that a green presentation can quickly get messy is with the creation of marketing collateral. Presentation folders, envelopes, propaganda of all kinds need to be printed and printing can be hazardous to the earth’s health. Luckily, many printers nowadays can offer environmentally-friendly soy-based inks. They look great and they give you bragging rights!

Less is More
If you have a lot of materials you’d like to leave your audience with, take the time to really seek out all the alternatives available to you. Nowadays most printers have a variety of styles and materials available that will allow you to create a complex, compelling presentation folder full of goodies without sacrificing style points or greenness.

Stick ‘em Up
One last tip for keeping your printing cheap and green: Consider using stickers instead of printing on folders and envelopes. Stickers can look really great and can allow you to recycle old collateral materials by relabeling instead of throwing them away and re-printing your next project.

Brag About It
While greening up your presentation may cost more in the short run, you can translate that cost into free promotion of your company as a cutting-edge, green firm. Make sure all of your materials are clearly labeled as recyclable and earth-friendly. By wearing your green proudly on your sleeve, you can generate the other kind of green by promoting your business as conscientious, progressive and ahead of the pack!

About the Author: Scott Schwertly is an epic storyteller.  Today, he owns and operates Ethos3 Communications, a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.

He may live in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs, but he calls San Diego home – the place of his beloved San Diego Chargers.  Scott has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University.

We’d like to point out this creative style of presentation design. It’s called the “back of the napkin” and comes from Dan Roam, who is a SlideShare user, and an accomplished author & visual thinker. Check out Dan’s slideshare profile here. Dan has actually uploaded a 4 part series of “back of the napkin” presos on the American Healthcare System (see the 4 part playlist shared below using the presentation pack).

| Get your Presentation Pack

You might have already caught these on TechCrunch (in separate back to back articles). We’re sharing both these decks together for those who missed it.

The first of these decks is titled VC Non Admissions. The deck was adapted from a thread on ExpertCEO contributed by a range of CEOs and VCs about the top twelve things you’d never hear a VC say.

The reply came fast. And it was titled Founders Non Admission.

Founder Non-Admissions

View more OpenOffice presentations from Chris Yeh.

All for friendly, tongue-in-cheek banter.

The Twitter book by Sarah Milstein and Tim Or’Reilly got me thinking about this. In retrospect, its one of those duh ideas. For some types of books, the presentation format makes a lot of sense. When the material is visual, less word heavy and needs to be browsed through easily. Yes, it would not work for a Iliad, for a John le Carre novel, or for Obama’s autobiography. But like the graphic novel, it could be its own type thing.

The Twitter book, on my desk right now, demonstrates that. Pages alternate between a series of tweets and text. The text is in large font and on many pages there are only a few lines. Its easy to skim through, or take time to do a more thorough read. One did not need a 100 page, text-heavy book format for this topic. The goal of this book is to make interesting observations, and let tweets do the talking. The format lets that happen naturally.

Should you be considering the presentation - book format? It might make sense if you are developing a series of talks into a book. You already have a set of presentations, your ideas illustrated with visuals. Why not develop it into a presentation-book?

Over at Boing-Boing, Steven Johnson, author of such brilliant books like Emergence and Mind Wide Open makes the case for Obama using PowerPoint.

So many of the epic problems that Obama is going to be wrestling with over the next four years involve systems of great complexity and scale: the bailouts and stimulus programs, our national energy use, the immense expenditures involved in fighting two wars, the global scope of climate change. Tufte would be the first person to argue that complex systems like these are not easily explained using sentences and statistics, particularly when we’re talking about such vast numbers. I can imagine a White House address on the stimulus package, or his long-term plan for energy independence, where instead of sitting at a desk reading from a teleprompter, he’s actually walking us through the problem and his proposed solution with a backdrop of visually arresting and memorable slides.

I agree with this reasoning. Many of the types of problems that Obama is going to be dealing with need to be communicated in medium that can be both data rich and visually arresting.  And many designers on SlideShare have shown serious problems like globalization (Shift Happens) can be communicated in a simple yet visually arresting manner.

What do you think? Does Obama need for PowerPoint (or Keynote) for that matter of fact? Please post your comments below…