Choosing Fonts for Presentations, Print, and Web

Font love is a disease. Most likely, most people do not understand this - after all, we live in a country where signs and windows are decorated with such illiteracy that sometimes you want to get a camera and take a picture of this “happiness” and put it on the Internet in order to show what can bring human indifference. Therefore, a person who has a FontFont catalog on the table and who sometimes grumbles that de “not bad enough to buy this font” is sometimes perceived as a bit “not so good”. However, it takes a lot of my time to figure out which fonts are appropriate and how to develop my own unique style for presentations, web typography and typography. In this post - a few thoughts about what works / does not work, and what I would like to try.

In my practice, fonts are used in the following material:

• On slides in IT community presentations
• On corporate documents (brochures, proposals, etc.) and not only
• On web pages both on my resources and in thematic blogs

There are many sources, and for everyone I want to create some special style.


I do presentations in the IT field. It has its own specifics, because firstly I use the Latin alphabet (the number of English terms is overwhelming), and secondly, for example code, you need to use monospace headsets.
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The essence of the presentations is that the person for 2-3 hours who lasts the presentation is not tired of it. For this, a dark background is used, although in my youth I naively used black text on a white background. ¹ To use a dark background I was motivated primarily by the template Techdays.ru , which

• Uses white text on a dark gray background.
• Uses gold and white bullets for lists ²
• Uses Segoe ³ Headset

The Segoe headset is quite good, especially for the Cyrillic alphabet which I, as already mentioned, do not use for presentations:




I remember for the presentations, I started with Arial. Moreover, it was a corporate standard where I worked. After several experiments with different headsets (including the Segoe, naturally), I settled on the Myriad font. The reason is perfect, as it seems to me, readability. There is also a Condensed style (useful!).

In terms of the font for the code, the Techdays template recommended Courier New, which seemed a little out of place to me. As a result, Consolas was chosen, which perfectly harmonizes with Myriad (although I really want to have Consolas Condensed). Consolas is ideal for large sizes, but since there are no opticals either, it is too thin with a small size.

Here is an example of a slide using techdays and bullets and Myriad + Consolas:




A lot of headsets have been considered for slides. Here are some of them:

• Calibri. In principle, this headset works well, and my colleagues successfully use it (see, for example, here ).
• Arial / Helvetica. Too familiar, IMHO.
• Bliss. Gorgeous but expensive. Very similar to Myriad.
• Gill Sans. Strange, although I have one presentation with this headset.
• Header-only fonts, such as Friz Quadrata.

For the code, there were again several options, including

• Bitstream Vera Sans. Not bad but not perfect.
• Lucida Console. Generally terrible, IMHO.
• LucasFonts TheSansMono Condensed. I am pleased to accept as a gift. In general, Condensed style is just what you need for presentations. Why not Consolas Condensed - I'll never know.

Naturally, others often wedge in the used headsets, mostly preinstalled in Windows. For example, beautiful ampersands from the Wingdings headset. (Yes, yes, there are beautiful ampersands, look!)

For presentations, there is one special case that is worth mentioning - this is when a presentation is created not for the projector but solely for webcast. In this case, it is not so critical which fonts to use - for the searchlight, of course, you need sans serif fonts, but any screen will go. Also, it is useful for the screen to make the background pure black, so that when viewed in full screen, the background merges with the margins (if any). Here is an example (already in Russian):




The example above uses the Minion headset, the benefit of which is a very good harmony between Cyrillic and Latin characters. Oddly enough, the headset works well with Consolas. Of course, the Minion's “weight” is much smaller than the Consolas, compared to Myriad, which in terms of the thickness of the elements almost coincides with the Consolas in those bowling ranges used for presentations.

By the way (although a bit oftopic) I will say that I also write extensions for PowerPoint that add additional typographic delights to the presentations.


If you use Word, your hands are already connected. If you forget about kerning, ligatures, and so on, then your choice of fonts is still limited - after all, when you transfer a Word document to another person, you need to reflect everything correctly. Therefore, for corporate parties, the main fonts were Arial + Times New Roman (TNR). Now, with the release of the 2007 office, perhaps the new du jour headset will be Calibri.

Fortunately, sometimes it turns out to use more interesting headsets in a corporate environment. For example, if you send project evaluations to clients in PDF (and most companies do this), then you can use any headset.

In my case, this is a free Gentium headset. It is not suitable for Cyrillic (there is no support for italics), but for Latin, and even with a good chopped headline - perfect! On the one hand, it would seem that it would not be worthwhile to frighten businessmen with such a headset. On the other hand, create a document with this headset and open it in Adobe Reader, or print it using a cheap 600dpi printer. Compare with Times New Roman. Feel the difference? ^four




I rarely have to do documents using Cyrillic. Usually when it is required (for example, for this pamphlet ), I “fear” and use Myriad + Minion. Let even one thousand western typographers tell me that Georgia Matthew Carter is a “standard” and “the best Cyrillic font on the planet”, for me it will always remain a bit “web” and full. A Minion is just super for Cyrillic:





When I started publishing various articles on the Internet, the first thing I did was to write a layout system that I could customize to fit my needs. It really untied my hands - for example, now I can take and replace all the headers with my favorite headset, automatically download the generated images via FTP and refer to them from the editor.

Despite this, the text itself still needs to be somehow typed, and fonts should also be chosen. I have many sites, but in most of them I’m cautious - I use Calibri, since this font is rendered very well in different languages ​​(examples can be found here or here . I also used Georgia on my old blog, which also worked well.

Sometimes there is a temptation to do something new - for example, to take Sylfaen as a basis, and for italics, take Palatino (Palatino just Cyrillic italics). While I'm still not as brave as to use such exotic, but perhaps some of this will come in handy in the future.


After reading what I wrote above, I’m not sure if the Habrasoobshchestvu. More precisely, it may be necessary in terms of what now is a pretext to talk on the subject of fonts and typography with like-minded people. (Although disclaimer: I am not a layout designer or type designer, just an amateur.) Therefore, if interested, write below, or in a personal.

And if you are a millionaire, then here is my wish-list :)

• LucasFonts TheSansMono Condensed
• TEFF Trinité
• DTL Caspari
• Bliss

1. ↑ See for example here .
2. ↑ We borrowed these bullets for our corporate website .
3. ↑ This headset is licensed only to create material for Microsoft. That suits our .Net communities but, judging by the license, it cannot be used for other purposes.
4. ↑ By the way, Gentium looks quite strange when editing in Word. What is clear - the font is not optimized for ClearType, whether hinting is made in it or not - is unknown. Do not be scared!