Pt 3. Making Things Pretty — Quality food begins with quality ingredients.
Experienced chefs will tell you making a good burger doesn’t begin with the seasoning, molding, or cooking. It starts with selecting the right base for the burger, the patty. The same goes for cooking up an aesthetically pleasing deck — in this case, your patty is the right typography. Every other element in the deck should be created to complement your chosen type and treatment.
Categorically, type falls into two classifications: Serif and Sans Serif.
Serif fonts feature little tips/feet at the end of letters (think Times New Roman). Because of the “serif”, words appear to be “connected” and are thus easier to read when in smaller sizes or groups. They are generally used when writing long bodies of text.
Sans-serif fonts do not contain a tip at the end of letters (think Arial). They are typically considered to look “modern”. Because of the cleaner edges, they are popularly used in titles and bigger font sizes. When companies are scrambling to put together a deck, typography selection is an important step in the design process that is often overlooked. Please don’t settle for the default font that Powerpoint provides.
So, how do you approach picking the right type of font for your deck? You need to know who your audience is. For example, if you are designing for a technology company, there’s a good chance you will pick a sans-serif font to give it a futuristic look. On the other hand, if you are designing for a high-end luxury brand, you would probably want to go with serif as it will produce an air of sophistication and class that you normally see in luxury brands.
But like most things with design, there are general guidelines but never strict rules. Each company is unique and the message they want to send also varies.
Let’s look at a well-done example:
Marcus is Goldman Sach’s lesser well-known consumer-facing platform that offers loans and high-yield savings accounts. They are a modern financial services platform. This identity informs the typography they have selected. If you look at Marcus’ website, you’ll see that their body text is sans-serif and that their headers are serif, breaking the rules to communicate an identity of their own. While the sans-serif was chosen to communicate a modern friendly vibe, their large serif headers communicate their financial service roots.
Long message short: take the time to understand the company’s brand voice and mission. Then, apply what you now know about the differences in typography and do something creative.
Cooking Tip: Although there are general practices that guide the usage and selection of typography, like a burger, there are no hard and fast rules. Your client should always have the final say. Regardless of how much the chef loves beef, they would never serve it to a vegetarian client.
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I know I’ve always struggled with picking between cool looking fonts and fonts that fit in with the branding. I hope this was helpful. Tomorrow, we’ll look at how to pick colors for decks.
