![]() Photoshop can be intimidating at first because there’s just so much that’s possible and so many tools and features. You don’t need to become an expert at graphic design to make beautiful slides! I wouldn’t even consider myself a designer because there’s so much I can’t do and I rely a lot on existing design assets – the only advantage I have, really, is that I’ve been hacking around with Photoshop and web design since I was a teenager. Focus on the most powerful editing features I use RightFont for Mac, which integrates with Google Fonts out of the box, and there’s also FontBase, which is free and supports Windows and Linux as well.Ģ. The default font apps that come with standard operating systems aren’t particularly nice so if you’ve already downloaded a lot of fonts, it can be helpful to install a font manager with features for previewing, sorting, filtering, organising and activating your fonts. You can always try them out interactively in your browser, and many fonts also offer free trial versions with limited character sets so you can test them in your project before you commit. Remember that fonts are made by people and require significant design effort, so please don’t pirate them. Preview of fonts and design examples on Creative Market ( #1, #2) As a nice bonus, many font stores include not only plain examples of the font itself but also designs showing the font in use that you can take inspiration from. High-quality fonts available on sites like can sometimes get pretty expensive but marketplaces like Creative Market offer many great alternatives by independent creators, often for under $20 per font family. The site also provides a handy glossary that explains all relevant font terminology.įor a less curated and more hit-or-miss selection, there’s also Dafont, which offers over 80k and mostly free fonts including many niche types of styles. If you’re looking for interesting fonts for slide titles, the “Display” category is a good one to start browsing through, and you can also define more fine-grained filtering. ![]() Over the years, Google Fonts has amassed a significant collection of free fonts you can try out in the browser and download for use in your project, and even find suitable font pairings for. For instance, I’ve been using GT Walsheim on this site since pretty much the beginning, and Calibre has been the primary font for most of my slides and Explosion’s websites for years. ![]() Of course, you don’t need to pick or buy a new font for every talk – if there’s a font you particularly like, it can become your “signature font” and it will give your slides a unique, but consistent look. I also took inspiration from the examples provided of the fonts in context and used some of them in the overall design to really use the fonts to their full potential.Įxample of slides almost entirely carried by fonts Two recent sets of slides I made are almost entirely carried by their respective font: Mangrove Sans and Script for Matt’s talk on beating GPT-4 on predictive tasks, and Marjorie for my keynote on LLMs from prototype to production. (Just be careful because it can become very addictive – if you enjoy buying domains you don’t need, you’ll love shopping for fonts!). Even if you do nothing else, a good font can add a lot of personality, and discovering new fonts is a lot of fun. A good font can make a world of differenceįonts are truly a secret weapon and it’s my number one recommendation for a quick and easy way to spice up your slides. I get a lot of questions from people who like my slides and want to do something similar for their talks, which is what inspired this post.ġ. It mostly collects some tips based on how I make my slides, which are quite specific and targeted to a certain type of conference, talk style and audience. People often ask me for tips and tooling recommendations, so in this guide, I’m sharing some of my not-so-secret secrets and three beginner-friendly steps for how you can up your slides game for the upcoming conference season!ĭisclaimer (since this post also got widely shared outside of my circles): This blog post is not intended as a general-purpose guide to making universally good slides. It’s fun and keeps me motivated to put in the work and actually write my talks. I’ve done quite a bit of conference speaking over the years, and I love designing slides and coming up with a new visual theme for each topic.
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