How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

One of the many overlooked parts of creating a presentation is the use of fonts. Many people just simply open their Powerpoint application and start typing. The thought of actually looking inside the font drop-down menu never occurs to them, and they end up creating a standard, old looking presentation.

Actually looking for and choosing a font can go a long way to making your presentation stand out and look better.

Nancy Duarte in her wonderful book Slide:ology gives some great advice on choosing the right font for your presentation. The right font can create the tone for your presentation, for example an informal font such as “Courier” can set an informal tone to your presentation, whereas a more formal font such as “Georgia” can give your presentation a more formal feel.

I would advise you to avoid using Times, Times new Roman or Arial as these are usually the default fonts for most presentational software programmes.

If you want to collect some unusual fonts there are many places where you can get free fonts. One of my favourites  is 1001 Free Fonts – here you can download for free many wonderful fonts that look fresh and new.

So, before you start writing your next presentation, take a couple of minutes to look through your fonts and select a font that you like and fits the ‘feel’ of your presentation.