I am using MS PowerPoint 2019 with the default settings and with these, my slide looks like this:
It by default uses Calibri Light 44 for the slide caption, and Calibri for the rest of the text (except math formulas). But it looks ridiculous to me - why should the slide caption look "less bold" and be from a thinner font than the rest of the slide? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Is it some modern graphical design that I just don't see, or is it just a bad default?
It looks a bit dumb.
One of the goals graphic designers often have is to use lighter and lighter font weights as the size increases. That means the width of the strokes is roughly the same at different sizes, almost to create the illusion that all the letters in the layout were drawn with the same pen. That means a light font weight at large sizes, a bolder font weight at smaller sizes. You can see a guide to that here. This was one of the best things about classic metal type serif fonts like Bembo, the designers carefully designed every size right for the size it would be printed at to make the design feel comfortable at any size.
It feels here like someone tried that but it hasn't worked out, the body text is too large and the heading is too small. Needs better balance of size. This is one of the things variable fonts can help pro designers with.
