The Billboard Rule for Pitch Deck Font Size
· 2 min read · Tim Cooley
There's an actual formula for how big letters on a billboard need to be.
Sign companies use a rule of thumb: roughly one inch of letter height for every ten feet of viewing distance. A driver doing 65 miles an hour on the highway has maybe two seconds to catch your message before it's gone. So the letters on that board aren't a design choice. They're math, worked backward from how far away the reader is standing.
Nobody designs a billboard by looking at it on their phone and calling it done.
I think about this because most pitch decks are built the exact same wrong way. A founder opens their laptop, writes the deck at arm's length, squints at it, decides it looks sharp, and closes the lid satisfied. The problem is nobody in an investor meeting reads a deck from fourteen inches away. They read it from across a conference table, or from the back of a room, projected onto a screen that's fighting with fluorescent lighting.
There's a rule for this too, and it's blunter than the billboard formula. Take the age of the oldest person in the room and divide it by two. That's your minimum font size. Seventy-year-old investor in the room, don't go below 35-point. It sounds almost like a joke until you realize it forces something useful: fewer words per slide, because you physically can't cram a paragraph into 35-point type.
Same goes for color. Slides that look crisp on a MacBook screen can turn to soup the second they hit a projector. Light green on white looks clean on a monitor and disappears entirely under conference room lighting. The only way to know is to actually put it up on the wall, in the room, under the real bulbs, before the day it counts.
None of this is about talent. It's about testing the thing in the conditions it'll actually be judged in, instead of the conditions where it's most flattering to you.
More on this in The Pitch Deck Book: https://www.amazon.com/Pitch-Deck-Book-Business-Investors/dp/B098PKPL73
Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.
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