Using custom fonts on Keynote for iPad (and Slideshare)

Aug 30, 2010 by AnaFxFz    4 Comments    Posted under: Design, Presentations

Keynote for iPad currently supports over 40 fonts and font families, including American Typewriter, Helvetica, Futura, Papyrus, and Zapfino. When importing a presentation that uses a font not available on iPad, iWork attempts to replace an unsupported font with one that is a close match. If a close match is not found, the Helvetica font will be used instead. If you like to use custom fonts, it can be pretty frustrating to see your presentation showing up on your iPad with a plain text that’s not even close to what you originally designed.

Nancy Duarte says in her book Slide:ology that “every font has its own personality: serious or playful, stately or friendly, bold or humble.” And I think that fonts transfer their personality to the slides, they become the “soul” of the presentation. To me, it is very frustrating when I upload a deck of slides to my iPad (or to Slideshare) and the original font is gone. It feels like I am seeing someone else’s design, there is no longer a strong connection to my feelings about those slides.

I understand that some people [mistakenly] don’t pay a lot of attention to choosing the right fonts in presentation design, but if you love visual communications, design, or typography, and if you’re serious about your presentations, read on!

I have a portfolio of over 100 slides on my ipad. ALL of them look exactly the same as they look in the original deck, whether is Powerpoint or Keynote for Mac, and I achieved that result by using a very simple technique of superimposing images of the original slides.

There are a few cons when you use images of your slides:
1) You will have to build your deck twice – but the second time will be quick and a no-brainer.
2) Obviously, nothing is editable when you build a presentation with images of another presentation.
3) You will lose any animations that you had in the original presentation.

However, all slides will look exactly the way you want on the iPad and on Slideshare, and to me this is a lot more important, especially if you are building a portfolio where all you need is to showcase a high-quality image of your work.

I will use Guy Kawasaki’s “Enchantment” presentation as example because it was designed with his custom made fonts, and also because I already used this technique in order to have “Enchantment” on my iPad. Also, Guy has uploaded the original powerpoint version of the presentation to Slideshare yesterday and, sadly, it does not look as it should – his fonts aren’t there, and the presentation looks plain (not to mention that some text boxes are also off). It was a bit sad to see the Slideshare version, it is definitely not what we had in mind. When he sent me the Slideshare links, I was already writing this blog post to talk about using any fonts on Keynote for iPad, his email reminded me that the same problem occurs when you upload slides with custom fonts to Slideshare, which does not support a whole bunch of fonts.

So here we go:

1) Design your presentation on your computer (not directly on the ipad, of course), using whatever font you like. In this case, the original presentation was designed in Powerpoint for Mac.
2) Save your presentation as pictures – make sure you select a high resolution in the ‘save as’ options menu.

3) Open a new Powerpoint or Keynote file (preferably Keynote if your intention is to upload it to your iPad) and re-build your presentation using the images of the original slides that you just saved. These images should take the entire slide. Save the file, upload it to your iPad or Slideshare and Voilà! Enjoy your perfect presentation with all custom fonts you used in the original design! :)
Note: after you saved the original presentation as pictures, you can also import those images to your iPad and then build the new deck directly on your device.

Some people prefer to save the presentation as PDF, which is supported by Slideshare. You can also see a PDF presentation using iBooks on your iPad. I personally prefer to avoid the PDF version due to the substantial loss of image quality when the file is exported from Powerpoint/Keynote to PDF. I use a great amount of high-res graphics in most of my decks, and good resolution is crucial to me, but if your slides have more text than images, that’s definitely another good option.

*UPDATE: In case you want to keep the animations of your original presentation, you can also convert only the text portion of your slides into images. In Lion OS X, you can easily convert your text using the “Create Banner Image from Text” action in the OS X Automation. You can find a how-to post about this HERE. In PowerPoint you can simply select the text box and “Save as Picture” (the selected text will be saved as a PNG image with transparent background).