[loph]

I disagree with the whole typeface (font) selection discussion in the article.

You want people to read your slides? Don't use a hard-to-read typeface.

Before building a "deck" for a presentation I suggest reading Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" (https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...)

[qingcharles]

Counter-point:

"Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting."

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-hard-fonts-retention.....

[mdekkers]

Counter-Counter point, those studies were not of very high quality. Very small groups, and the “hard to read font” was Comic Sans which isn’t actually hard to read, just different. Also, Comic Sans is well known to be the butt of all font jokes, which could have been acting as some kind of marker for the content. A lot for variable unaccounted for.

On the other hand, the author of OPs “beginners’ guide” treats presentations like a brochure, which is in itself a beginners’ mistake. If you want to provide truly *excellent* advice to a beginner, point them to Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule, you cannot really go wrong with that - yes, it is geared towards pitching for VCs but the approach makes sense regardless.

For a bit more of an in-depth approach, see this dude: https://www.presentationzen.com

[tetris11]

I genuinely think that it pays to make a presentation as generic black-on-white or white-on-black as possible.

Why? People have trained for decades on these templates, sitting through boring talk after boring talk, slowly learning how to extract as much info as they need from a glance.

The real meat of a talk is what the person is saying, and if the slides are too fancy, then people are forced to split focus.