Font, copy & licensing
Common typographic styles
While designing your slides, any commonly used font styles should be saved to your software's styles library. This enables developers to quickly extract common styles and allows for wholesale changes to be made quickly.
Font size
When designing content, keep in mind that it is going to be viewed across multiple devices. This in turn limits the minimum font sizes that can be used, ensuring your content is legible across devices.
See the table below for minimum font sizes based on deck ratio:
| Deck ratio | Slide content | Footnotes |
|---|---|---|
| 4:3 | 12px | 10px |
| 16:9 | 18px | 14px |
To help test your selected font sizes, we recommend reviewing your content at 50% zoom.
Keep font size variants to a minimum. eg. We try to keep our styles to a maximum of 6 different size and leading combinations, plus a few outliers for large stat displays. Of course this may change depending on your content, but your font-size variations helps enforce cohesion and continuity across your deck.
Even vs. uneven Font sizes
We highly recommend only using even numbered font sizes. ie. 12px, 14px ... 28px, 30px etc. We need to scale content for particular uses, and even numbers allow for smoother and more reliable scaling.
Font limits
In order to keep deck size to a minimum, fonts included in each deck need to be limited to a recommended total of 4, with an absolute maximum total of 6.
The reason for this is that your deck does not appear until all fonts have finished loading. This affects Remote and Share presos the most as your client’s presentation will not begin until this load process is complete.
Each font weight results in a new inclusion.
Try to avoid italics where possible. If the occasional italic is unavoidable (eg. sources), content developers can apply a "faux italic" to avoid loading the font.
Example of included fonts:
- Source Sans Pro - Light
- Source Sans Pro - Regular
- Source Sans Pro - Medium
- Source Sans Pro - Bold
Licensing
Unlike a website, the fonts utilised within your deck designs will need to be embedded into the app and therefore require a distribution/app font licence.
If your current brand guidelines dictate the use of paid fonts — for which you don't currently own the distribution/app font license — we recommend considering an alternative free font for this application use case. To address the inflexible and expensive approaches associated with font licensing issues, it is standard practice in design guidelines to provide some flexibility in this area. Historically, the alternative fonts selected by clients are from the Google Fonts suite.
It's worth noting that your agency/brand may have already considered this issue, so it's worth raising with them.