Choosing one typeface and one accent colour for slides

A minimal deck has very little on each slide. So what’s there has to be chosen with care.

Two choices do most of the work. One typeface. One accent colour.

Get these right and the deck feels like a single, quiet thing. Get them wrong and even empty slides feel noisy.

Why one of each

Every new font or colour asks the eye a question. Is this different? Does it matter?

When there is only one typeface, nobody wonders. When there is only one accent, it always means the same thing: look here.

Restraint isn’t about style. It’s about making meaning easy to see.

Choosing the typeface

Look for a family, not just a font. A typeface with several weights gives you range without adding a second face.

What to look for

• Clear at a distance. Open letter shapes, generous spacing, distinct characters. Check that 1, l and I don’t blur together.
• Several weights. At least a regular and a bold. A medium or light is a bonus.
• Comfortable in large sizes. Your headlines will be big. Some faces look awkward when scaled up.
• Available where you present. If the deck will open on another computer, the font needs to be there too, or embedded.
• Right for the language. If your talk uses Hindi, Tamil or another script, check the typeface supports it well.

Sans or serif

Both can work.

A clean sans serif feels modern and neutral. It’s a safe default for most talks.

A well-made serif can feel warmer and more thoughtful. It suits reflective talks, teaching and storytelling, as long as it stays readable at size.

Choose the feeling you want, then test it on a real screen from the back of a room.

Using one typeface well

With one face, contrast comes from size and weight.

Element	Treatment
Main statement	Large, regular or medium
Key word or number	Bold, or the accent colour
Small caption or credit	Much smaller, regular
Speaker notes	Whatever is easiest for you to read

Avoid italics for long lines on screen. Use them, if at all, for a single word.

Skip underlines, outlines, shadows and all-caps paragraphs. Weight and size are enough.

Choosing the accent colour

The accent is the one colour that says this matters.

Start from the background

Pick your background first: off-white, soft grey, or a deep neutral for dark rooms. Then choose text with strong contrast against it.

The accent must contrast with the background too. A pale yellow on off-white disappears. A deep blue on near-black does too.

One colour, chosen for a reason

Good reasons to pick an accent:

• It matches your organisation or school, quietly.
• It suits the mood of the talk. Calm blues and greens, warm terracotta, a clear red for urgency.
• It stays distinct for people with colour vision differences. Don’t rely on red against green alone to carry meaning.

Test it projected, not just on your laptop. Projectors often wash colours out.

Using one accent well

Use it rarely. That’s the whole trick.

• One word in a statement.
• One bar in a chart. The rest stay grey.
• One number on a big-number slide.
• A thin line or marker that shows where you are in a sequence.

If the accent appears on every slide, it stops meaning anything. A few appearances in a whole talk is often enough.

Never use the accent for decoration. Backgrounds, borders and shapes stay neutral.

A small style sheet

Write your choices down before you build the deck. A short list is enough:

• Typeface: one family, two or three weights
• Background: one colour
• Text: one colour
• Accent: one colour, for emphasis only
• Sizes: headline, caption, small print

Then stick to it. Every slide, first to last.

If you’re working with colleagues, share the sheet. It keeps a shared deck looking like one talk.

When rules bend

Sometimes you need more.

A data-heavy talk might need a second colour for a comparison. A talk with code might need a monospace face for code samples only.

Bend once, for a clear reason. Then hold the line everywhere else.

A quick check

• Is there only one typeface in the deck?
• Do size and weight do the work of emphasis?
• Does the accent appear only where something matters?
• Does it read from the back row and on a projector?
• Would someone recognise any slide as part of this talk?

For how type and colour fit the wider practice, see minimalist presentation design. For the accent at its most useful, try how to build a slide around one big number. ZenDeck keeps type and colour this restrained by default.