There's something in the water of Silicon Valley that makes everyone really...particular about font sizes.
You can trace the lineage straight back to Steve Jobs, a man who could tell Arial from Calibri with a blindfold on. The stories of him imposing this ruthless, uncompromising attention to detail on teams at Apple have become sort of tech mythology at this point, and I think many people including myself have responded by having an almost religious dedication to being consistent in everything they do. Put the company logo 2" from the page border on every marketing asset you create. Never drop the Oxford comma. Always use the same sized font on every slide.
I get why this happened. Being consistent is perhaps the clearest way to show you're paying close attention to something. Your boss doesn't always know how many hours you worked on something, but if you can point to a slide deck and say, "Every single slide header is in size 18 font," they at least know you were diligent in how you did it. Being consistent is very demonstrable in that way.
But I also think it's really easy to overcorrect and be too consistent in everything you do. You can reach a level of consistency in your work where the choices you're making are no longer serving the consumer or the audience but instead serving your own insatiable craving for having "followed the rules" and achieved peak consistency. Put another way: The Beatles looked fantastic on The Ed Sullivan Show in their matching suits, but they would have just looked silly if they all wore the same-sized suit.
Let's pretend you're designing three different marketing assets: an Instagram ad, a supermarket flyer, and a billboard. These are all really different use cases with different dimensions and different audiences. So you could try your hardest to over-templatize things and set really rigid rules for how big the company logo should be relative to the entire asset size and how many points bigger the headline font should be than the body font, but I think at the end you'll look at all three assets you made and realize they all look a little crap. Because you never really sat down and went, "What can I do with this specific canvas that will make it look great?" You just followed a rulebook.
And that's the common thread behind all of this. I think the moment you start overdosing on consistency is the moment you start following a slate of rules rather than a slate of principles. They're two different things. Principles are higher-order concepts that are supposed to guide you whenever you start building something or have to figure out how to operate under certain circumstances. They're things like, "Make sure the brand is the focus," and, "Emphasize the why, not the what," and, "Don't use a single word more than necessary." Rules are more rigid. They don't leave any room for personal agency. They're things like, "Make all the headers 18 point font," and, "Put the company logo in the bottom right corner with this percentage of padding from the edge." Whether it's creative design or organizational ways of working or product development or whatever, I think devoting yourself to a sacred text of rules rather than a sacred text of principles prevents you from acknowledging that different circumstances require different approaches and what works best for one task might not work best for the next and that's okay. You can be consistent in your approach even if you're not perfectly consistent in your outcomes.
Once again: The Beatles would have looked utterly ridiculous if they were all wearing the same-sized suit. If you try and find something that works okay for everything, you're really finding something that works great for nothing.
Being relentlessly consistent is an easy way to show how much care you put into what you're doing. But an even better way to show how much care you put into something is to just make it look really freaking good. And if that means using multiple different font sizes within the same slide deck, then sue me.
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