Design best practices tell us that whitespace matters. Space between sections improves readability, creates hierarchy, and makes layouts feel cleaner.
Meanwhile, the most common feedback I get on B2B presentations is "can we make the font bigger?"
B2B decks are content-heavy and splitting one slide into two isn't always the answer. Sometimes the whole argument has to be visible at once, because that slide will be discussed, not admired. Still, for a long time this feedback frustrated me. I'd explain that denser layouts are harder to scan. Clients would nod, agree — and ask for bigger text anyway.
At some point I stopped trying to convince them and started asking why the request was so consistent.
We were optimizing for different things. I was optimizing for visual clarity. My clients were optimizing for reading comfort — on a shared screen in a Zoom call, compressed, in a small window. They don't evaluate a slide by how much whitespace it has. They want to read it, understand it, and discuss it without struggling.
Best practices aren't universal rules. They're solutions for a specific context. What creates a great experience on a website or a pitch deck doesn't automatically work for a sales deck, where every detail on the slide is there to be questioned.
Sometimes "make the font bigger" is simply the better UX decision.