What Is the Apple Keynote Font?
Every Apple keynote font always amazes the crowd.
Are you curious to find out which captivating font Apple uses in its Keynote presentation?
Is it the sensational company name that triggers your curiosity or just the plain apple keynote font?
The amusement from an exhibition that will take you to a whole new world to create a successful visual presentation.
People at Apple Inc. knows that in every new product they must ignite their engines to create something big.
In Apple Inc., every product line launched is conferred for their ravenous clients.
When the first Macintosh got introduced, there were just a couple of fonts available in their systems.
Susan Kare started to fire up a change that would evolve afterward in a new font revolution for the PC era.
Why does Apple give so much importance to its fonts? Or is it just because it is an apple keynote font?
Well, we all need to thank the Co-founder and ex CEO of Apple for it, Steve Jobs.
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How Did It All Start?
Surprisingly or not, it all started with the famous speech by Steve Jobs at the Lane Tech College Prep High School.
In that speech, he reiterated to the world the importance of fonts on any product breakthrough.
Since the beginning, Apple understood the importance of having humanized fonts in their operating systems.
But people still are asking why are fonts so important?
After dropping out of college, he started to learn about serif and sans-serif typefaces.
Serifs are semi-structural details or small decorative twirls on the ends of the strokes that make up letters and symbols.
Sans-serif doesn’t have these features or twirls.
Change After Ten Years
Ten years after, he designed the first Mac, which came with something new: an extensive possibility of fonts.
By working with designer Susan Kare, they created new bitmap designs accessible in different sizes and styles.
The original concept was to name them after stops on a local Philadelphia train route.
Still, it ended up with a more dazzling and accessible idea of cities he loved.
The names given started with: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Geneva, London, Toronto, and Venice.
These names had the trump card of reflecting the typographical character of the cities in question.
The London typeface had an old-fashioned serif blackletter, also known as a Gothic script.
The Genève font had a cleaner Swiss sans-serif look.
The San Francisco had the appearance of letters torn from a newspaper.
The latter was also used in the new Apple Watch, other devices font from winter 2015.
The font San Francisco is also being used in Apple’s corporate scene since 2017.
This was the start of something revolutionary in our everyday relationship with typing letters.
Revolutionary in terms of the evolution of the word “font” in the vocabulary of every PC customer
Compared to the past the word “font” was just a piece of technical language limited by design and printing trades.
Keynote Presentation Font
It is not easy to find Jobs’ original typefaces these days as they all evolved in new fonts.
While thinking back to where we started the ability to change fonts seemed like technology from another planet.
Nowadays, the font Apple itself uses for presentations is Myriad Pro.
The font is a humanist sans-serif designed by Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems in 1991.
The version of Keynote used in their presentation is always the updated version different from the one in the market.
What Makes a Good Keynote Presentation
How can all these fonts make your presentation unique?
Keynote orators use storytelling to make sure the most valuable element, audience engagement, is considered.
The speaker’s job is to set the room’s tone by catching his audience’s attention and keeping it until the end.
The center of a successful presentation has to be memorable, compelling, and emotional for the audience.
Stories and anecdotes will help you illustrate your ideas and research, resulting in an effective presentation.
What are the fonts that may help you to set a professional presentation?
Pairing fonts is another thing to consider, as the last thing you want is for fonts to fight for the audience’s attention.
The perfect combination should present harmony between them without the one overpowering the other.
Multiple fonts create visual diversity, using two fonts similar to each other are more likely to clash.
In the same idea, two very different fonts will compromise your design, risking dragging it in different directions.
If you find the right association, your audience will not notice, what you have done.
What Font To Use In Your Presentation
You need to decide whether to use custom fonts or remain to the more typical ones installed on your Mac or IPad.
As you open your Keynote file, any custom font not installed will be mechanically replaced by your operating system.
Although this may be working for a textual document or email, it is a setback for a thoroughly crafted presentation.
The look of your characters will be different from what you aim for, the worst part will be variation in font sizes.
Text boxes created wide enough to fit a crucial sentence will suddenly cut off an extra line added.
As a consequence, a full chart you have worked for will get thrown into chaos.
This situation only occurs with software that allows the user to edit the text ( such as PowerPoint, Keynote, Word, etc.)
Difference When Working With Different File Formats
In different file formats (like PDF or JPG, PNG), fonts are installed as pixels.
In this type of format, the text will appear just as you designed and planned it, despite the fonts on your PC.
PowerPoint allows the user to replace fonts into a presentation.
Though this feature will only work on Microsoft, when you use your Mac platforms, it will not work on it.
Considering that more people use the IOS system, I would recommend not to rely on custom fonts.
Tablets and mobile devices create more issues for fonts.
That’s why the font library on a mobile device is more restricted than installed on a Mac or a Windows machine.
Mobile technology has progressed a lot in 2021, but displaying a deck of slides on a mobile device is not customary.
Everyone checks their emails on the go.
Your presentation will be disregarded if it is not legible on their devices because of poor font choice.
For this reason, it’s important to create a presentation that will look good on any station or device (sans-serif fonts work better).
Conventional Fonts
As explained, Steve Jobs explained that there are two basic types of fonts serif and sans-serif.
While the first font has little extended hooks at the bottom of each character, the second doesn’t.
For printouts, serif fonts work perfectly because the hooks connect the eyes and the letters on the clutched page.
It is much similar to cursive handwriting and makes it simpler to read in small font sizes.
If we look at on-screen presentations, sans-serif fonts are the best option for they are clearer in larger font size.
While in the print version, designers time and again use several different fonts.
Body text, headlines, page numbers, and footnotes are all set in different fonts.
The fonts in question determine their tone and show their importance on the page.
Looking at presentation designs, the best approach is to stick to one font to gain a gentle design.
With this regard, all text in a properly designed presentation is regarded as a heading.
Mac: Apple paid royalty fees for Helvetica and its installment as a custom font on all Apple computers.
Helvetica is a superb choice for a presentation font.
But, unfortunately (or not) Windows automatically replaces Helvetica with Arial.
On another note, Apple uses the font Myriad Pro in its presentations.
It looks good, in a Windows environment, it is not installed so you will incur the risk of replacing the font style.
iPad: the ultimate version of iOS includes a reasonably rich set of fonts.
What About Emphasizing Or De-Emphasizing?
The intuitive approach to emphasize will apply to the typographical tools: bold, italic, ALL-CAPS, or all of the above.
Sometimes the result is unattractive and will give your audience an impression of being strong.
Rather than highlighting text, design your slide in a way that the text naturally stands out.
For example, de-emphasize its surrounding elements, use white space or color contrast between text components.
Lastly, using bold letters can look upright on a slide, but underlining it solves the issue.
Font To Avoid
Here are the fonts you ought to AVOID.
Comic Sans is a sans-serif casual script typeface that has been abundantly used in children’s material.
Writings like comic books, and informal documents, something you don’t want your presentation to be connected to.
Unless the topic of your presentation is about children or an informal one.
Whether you decide to use custom fonts or not, still a list of infinite font possibilities is at your disposal.
Nonetheless, it is advised to be more cautious in diving into all the lists of fonts, always practice self-control.
The most used custom fonts are Helvetica, with a medium body text and bold condensed weight for headlines.
Specifically, about Arial, the problem is it only comes in very bounded weights (regular and bold).
Every font used with varying weights has a huge effect on your text’s visual aspect.
Bebas Neue Pro, used in all-caps is best for headlines for a more business touch presentation, free in Adobe.
Alternatively, League Gothic font is used for a narrower setting in these kinds of presentations.
The font was originally Alternate Gothic N1 designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1993.
Now the typeface became public after the company he created went bankrupt.
This past century has introduced numerous fonts considered classics by professional print designers.
The Font To Work With
Below is a list of fonts that will look good in a presentation design:
- Helvetica Neue and Helvetica Neue Condensed
- Frutiger: a predecessor of Helvetica, sans-serif intended to be highly readable
- Futura PT: geometric sans-serif typeface. It resembles the Bauhaus design style. Futura PT is excellent in all-caps.
- Gill Sans: humanist sans-serif and the original font of the London underground
- FF Meta: indeed very legible on screens, and it was meant to be, by its creator, the inverse of Helvetica
- Myriad Pro: a general-purpose typeface and the corporate font of Apple, used in all their communication
- Optima: it is between a serif and a sans serif, very much elegant and yet less legible on screens
- Univers: classic and large sans-serif similar to Helvetica, which also comes in endless amounts of weights
Wicked Fonts
In every presentation, a slide design must have an eye-catching font.
Striking fonts make use of funny text, loud messages, fat styles, handwritten notes, or cartoonish messages.
If you decide to use such a font, do not do it in just one slide, it’s not worth the effort to have it installed.
The trick here is you can save it as an image and just paste it back into your presentation.
Remember to copy the original editable text if you will need to make revisions in the future.
If you are looking for a website that offers free fonts, try Font Squirrel, you will find numerous fonts to add to your list.
Here are some examples:
- Boopee gives a handwritten finish
- Impact Label looks like the 70’s labeling machine
- The Boycott is a punk, wrench font that comes only in caps.
- American Typewriter used in the famous “I heart NY” logo, an option to consider.
Font Size
No rules are given for font size, just guidelines: a smaller font than 18 points will be unreadable in the back.
The Keynote Light Table view is one of the best options to do presentations, as I can see my slides at a distance.
With the guidelines for a clearer presentation, a bigger size font is not always the right way to go.
Maintain a clean, elegant, and moderate-sized text line instead of cluttering up the page with large typography.
The Keynote software enhances the use of text intended for distant reading at 12 – 18 points.
The use of fonts bigger than these requires an increase in the spacing between lines, the so-called leading.
In Keynote the default sizing is set to 1.0.
By all means, if you use font size 14, your text leading will be 1.0×14 = 14, as well.
Smaller font sizes will work well with this size, but for larger font sizes, the recommended size is 0.8 or 0.7.
Final Thoughts
Predict every platform your presentation will be shown on to make sure your design will work consistently.
Hence I would suggest you select a cross-platform font, different from the Apple keynote font.
Keynote presentations are not just to project in front of a crowd but, they often get emailed around to be viewed.
Therefore pick up a font that will provide a well-matched look across all operating systems.
There are a limited set of fonts such as Arial, Calibri, Century Gothic, and Tahoma that are customary to all platforms.
The fonts in general will remain consistent even if you open them up on a PC or a Mac.
Please remember that any native Mac fonts are exclusive, and will not open on another system.
Always review every presentation before sending or presenting to eradicate any surprise at the end.
Every detail that covered may it be about Apple or its rich history the point here is to choose a safe font.
A safe typeface will guarantee an elegant and awesome presentation on any device possible.
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