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Showing posts from 2011

Inside great presentations

Last night I was reading Before & After Magazine issue number 3. Their column "The thinking designer" was about what to look for (what to strive for) in good advertisement, but it could as well be applied to great (scientific) presentations: Their message is a surprise. They don't lose clarity. They involve the audience. They challenge curiosity.   They command answers. They let the audience think. They're always well executed. The "curiosity challenge" is also expressed in this quote from filmmaker Sheila Curran Bernard about documentaries At its best, documentaries [in our case scientific presentations] should do more than help viewers pass the time [or information]; they should demand their active engagement, challenging them to think about what they know, how they how it, and want more they want to learn. —Sheila Bernard Author of "Documentary Storytelling"

Design and Science

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My read these days is "Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman!", by physicist and Nobel-price winner Richard P. Feynman.  It is a good book, that among other things touches on the subject of scientific presentations. But that's not why I mention it, but rather for a shocking revelation. Feynman admits having little regard for philosophy, poetry and other activities where digressing is a common practice. I was shocked because my idea of people like him is of "universal geniuses" that acknowledge, respect, and admire multiple disciplines for what they are. I can't stop wondering what would Feynman think about design, a discipline guided by principles, guidelines, and subjectivity rather than by theorems and laws. If Feynman was a scientific genius, Charles and Ray Eames were design geniuses. The Eames office made a superb video on the sizes in the universe call "Power of Ten". Enjoy!

Please stop!!

Yesterday morning my wife told me there would been a talk about my home country and encouraged me to go. It was part of the "Public Colloquium — Area Studies and Political Order" at the local university. So yesterday afternoon I headed to the venue and arrived 15 minutes early thinking it would be good to get a seat on the back. I was surprised I was the first attendee and that the speaker hadn't arrived. That was the first signal of what was about to come. Earlier that day I had been having trouble with my phone, so tried to fix it while waiting for the lecture to start.  People started coming in and two minutes before five o'clock the speaker arrived, another bad signal. I guess it was naive from me to think the lecture would start at the announced time, it is Germany after all. When he arrived he looked more like a boxer going into a fight than like a lecturer, he barely smiled or greeted the audience. He got the LCD projector running and fired up his visuals. Hi

Presentation sin: Filler words

Filler words are a credibility killer. In this post, I link to the Six Minute blog for some answer to this problem. No matter the language of the presentation, filler words like "um", "uh", "ah", "am", "eh"are a pain to the audience. Thankfully, Andrew Dlugan's Six Minute blog on public speaking is again active and full of great advice. In one of his latest post " How to Stop Um, Uh, and other Filler Words " he  addresses the issue. I recommend you read it.

An editorial about presentations

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In this TED presentation, molecular biologist John Bohannon, PhD share his views about (scientific) presentations. Enjoy!

Focus to prevent unnecessary detail

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Detail clutters a presentation, and in scientific talks this gets even worse. Scientist and researchers think that detail convinces an audience. I disagree. In this post I discuss how focus helps avoid unnecessary detail. After I wrote about the problems with too much detail in presentations, I have started to grow more and more wary about it.  Two things that lead to too much detail are lack of preparation and unfamiliarity with the content. One solution to these problems is focus. Focus on the audience, where do you want to take to audience? Why should they come with you? What's in there for them? Be ready to answer the "so what?" question. In case you are a graduate student or a professor at a conference, you might want the audience to spend their time analyzing your idea, to alert on possible errors or to suggest possible improvement; you want to raise awareness about your research. If you dip your audience in detail and clutter, they might not be able to differen

Visual examples: The grid

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Last month I was in Brazil for two week, and among other things I helped designing visuals. I thought I might post the process of a particular one: Thankfully they knew better and asked me to get some images from the internet. After searching for some pics on Wikipedia I came up with this one which is always much better than the first slide. However there were some things I didn't like.  The text is misplaced, the cassette image is shitty, the picture on the upper right is suppose to be a book, but it doesn't look like one, because it isn't,  all in all the whole visual could be bolder. So this week I decided to work on it some more and I came up with this using a grid. Let me explain. The normal slide is 1024 pixels wide and 768 pixels high. This give a ratio of 4:3. A natural grid is this one which works great because I need to place 8 images. Each cell has a ration 1:1 (is a square). So I cropped the images to make squares.  Now you might be wondering what if I h

Presentation (anti)guru: Doug Zongker

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I found this video in a blog last week. If you have been into a scientific conference,  "you will not be able to resist the irony of this short video. " Have you experienced presentations like this?  Does your presentation look that this? Enjoy.   

Quick tutorial: Re-sizing an image (in a sort of right way) using gimp

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In this quick tutorial I show different ways to upscale an image an how to do it using gimp.  Last Wednesday I watched a presentation from Israeli presentation designer Jan Schultink where among other things, he talked about avoiding stretch images. You might know this case. You have a small image and want to make it bigger, so you pull the image handles but the image's proportions are not kept constant. To re-size an image keeping its proportions constant, press the Shift key and drag the handles. However you should not up-size an image. As a good practice, always use images that have at least the size height or width of your canvas (typically 1024×768). If you want to size the image in it full size and still it is some pixels short, you can use a black background to make it appear full size. Sometimes good practices are not real practices and you might yourself forced to use an up-sized image.  Something like this (click below to see in original size and see the resulting

Presentation Sin: Overboard detail

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The saying goes that the devil is in the detail, and in scientific presentations is this certainly the case. Sadly, all too often students, researchers and professors run over their audiences with too much detail. If everything is important, then nothing is important. If you provide too much detail, you will decrease the contrast of your talk, making it monotonous, losing your main point.  Short presentations, that is, 20 minute talks plus Q&A should be about --what I call-- vision: one solid point supported by two, maximum three arguments. Leave the detail for the report, article or even a book. Left: Clear contrast between your vision and the surroundings. Right: Tough to differentiate details from the surroundings Clarity, not detail should characterized short talks. If you suspect your are giving too much detail, chances are you have not defined your core message. In this case, you need to review who is your audience and why is it they are coming to see you. The fact that y

Using quotes in presentations

Following the using text in slides spirit of the past weeks, in this post I share some of quotes  I have gathered over the past year I learned about the use of quotes in presentations reading Guy Reynold's Presentation Zen.  There are many reasons why you would like to use quotes in your presentations. Here are a few: They can summarize a point in a couple of words.  They can add credibility to your point.  Somebody said it better. They can help you transition to your next point. They make you look smart.  They capsule high amount of knowledge in few words. As a tip, I would suggest to read the quote to your audience. It is one of those few times where reading a slide is a good thing. Also remember that the shorter the quote, the better. And as James Humes writes, try to use quotes of famous people as much as possible.  I have seen some people using quotes in scientific and academic fields.  Here are some of the ones I have collected. "Innovation proceeds more rapi

A word on visuals: Using text in slides part II

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In part I I talked about the shape of the text in slides. In part II I want to address the content. There are two basic questions. One is, when is the use of words better than the use of pictures? And the other, how to effectively use words in pictures? Let me kick off with the diagram below that I found in Wikipedia and remixed. On question that putting the information shown here into a written form would take more time to process. This is the point that the director of the Data Visualization at the University of New Hampshire, Colin Ware, makes. According to Mr. Ware, hierarchical relationships are most effective presented in a structured diagram (Graphics 1, Text 0). Now take a look at the diagram below. It is called a flowchart, and it is used to graphical display an algorithm. In this case computing the factorial of n, n!. In case you wonder n! = 1 x 2 x ... x n. The pseudocode of this flowchart would be something like this:  read n f = 1, m = 1 mark: f = f*m if(m ==

Presentation Gurus: Julian Treasure

Once again a presentation Guru from TED! Though I start to have mixed feelings about TED, I have to admit there are great presenters. Julian Treasure is one of them. His job description is exotic, he is a Sound Consultant. Enjoy watching!

Lessons I learned from The King's Speech

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In February 2011, I mentioned the film The King's Speech . Finally, yesterday I had the chance to see it. Here are three things I learned.   Two days ago the DVD of The King's Speech was released here in Germany. I got the 2-DVD edition yesterday and watched it. It is a good film and Colin Firth, who plays King George VI, together with Geoffrey Rush (The King's speech therapist) are superb. The film focuses on the unlikely friendship between these two characters rather than in the King's speech problem. Still, I think the film touches an important point: Communication is important, but without character is superfluous. Some historical background. George VI is the father of Queen Elizabeth II and brother of King Edward VIII. Their father, King George V, dies in early 1936 as the World War II is breaking. The elder son of King George V, David, becomes King Edward VIII but abdicates in less than a year in favor of a woman. His younger bother, Albert, becomes King Geor

A word on visuals: Using text in slides part I

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The use of text in slides is overused, almost abused. In this post I go through two useful principles to improve the use of text in your slides, namely the 6-words-per-slide and 10-20-30 principles.    There is a lot to say about the use of text in a presentation deck, but this is for sure: Minimize the number of words per slide. In this e-book Really Bad PowerPoint,  Seth Godin suggests to use a maximum of 6 words. In the clip below, former Apple Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki talks about his 10-20-30 principle. The 30 stands for 30pt (pt = point) as the minimum font size in a slide. To make this rule more precise take a look at the image below. Both sentences are written in 36pt, but one sentence is bigger than the other one (click on the image to enlarge.) Conclusion? Not only does size matter, also type matters (no pun intended!) John McWade from Before&After Magazine  suggests to look for types that contain simple lines have large counters and wide openings little o

A word on visuals: Image resources

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You might be willing to include images in your next presentation, but might be confused to know where to start. In this post I give a provide resources on where to get free images, how to choose good images and how to process them to fit your needs. Sadly, I forgot to take my camera to Paris. You got to love Wikipedia! I'm back from a (long) summer holiday in partly Paris. I was really  impressed by the quality of their advertisements. I was in fact so impressed that I'm  again immersed in graphic design and photography. So I thought I would write about photography resources: where to get free photos, what makes a image good for a presentation, and some tips on how to improve those free photos to get them to work. Where to get free but good images? I have mentioned this place already, but it so good I'll mention it again. Compfight is a Flickr search engine that filter images according to their license, either commercial or creative commons. So people already

The Power Button

The Power Button is the other punch to engrave key points on the audience's mind. It introduces your Power Line to the audience, by set them up to listen to you.  Last week I wrote about James Humes' Power Line as the first punch to engrave your key idea in the audience's mind. The second punch is the Power Button and it is the launcher of your Power Line. In the words of the author: The Power Button says to the audience "Ready—Set—Listen" to set them up for the Power Line that follows. I heard a very well known professor in the field of applied math using this Power Button back in 2009 in the Netherlands. Almost two year later I still remember his Power Button. Unfortunately his presentation was bad, but with the (perhaps unconscious) use of the Power Button he engraved in the mind the idea that  Tangential interpolation methods are the only possible set of method to attain H2-norm optimality. Nevermind that his means, I just want to point out this Power Butt

The Power Line

Many scientific presentations fail because the presenter lacks the energy and enthusiasm to connect with the audience. In this post I offer some advice on what to do whether you want to present or not to fix your key point in the audience's mind. The method is called Power Line Power Button. One of the reasons why so many scientific presentations suck is that the presenter fails to connect with the audience. Geology professor Jay H. Lehr knows this. In 1985 he wrote a 4 page article called Let There Be Stoning (click here to download it as a pdf file) describing the landscape of scientific presentations. This article ought to be a compulsory reading for all college students (and professors). Yes, your guest is right; I strongly encourage you to read it. Some scientific talks will be inherently bad because the presenter has no passion for that topic he or she must present. In an ideal world these people shouldn't be allowed to present that topic. If you find yourself in t

Presentation Gurus: Richard Feynman

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Last week I showed you an example of using photographs as visuals. Actually the last couple of posts have been heavy on my own examples. Let's change that by introducing a real guru on scientific presentations. Meet physicists Richard Feynman. Feynman was a great presenter who didn't live to meet the PowerPoint generation. I was able to find this on YouTube.  Enjoy!

Visual examples: using photos as visuals

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In this post I give an example of how photos can be used in a presentation's visuals. I show one more example of image manipulation and how to use the power of analogy to produce beautiful visuals.  I'm helping a friend creating a presentation stack for a talk about an exchange program between a university here in Germany and the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Strictly speaking this is not a scientific presentation, but it will take place in a university context. The audience is made of potential students that would take part on the program exchange. After gathering the important facts, I went to Wikipedia and Fickr to pull some images. All the images have a creative commons license.  Here are some examples: To start, Sao Paulo. I pulled this panorama of old downtown Sao Paulo from Wikipedia. The original is larger than the size of canvas. Instead of trying to scale it or crop it to make it fill in one slide, I animated it in Keynote by moving from right to left.

A word on visuals: Two photo tricks

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Scientific presentations can profit  from cinematographic storytelling, specially from those effects that direct the eye gaze. In this post I present the vignetting and background blur effects. They are quick to prepare and yield great results.      If you are including photographs in your presentation there are two classic tricks to help to direct the attention of the view to exactly what you what. The tricks are called vignetting and background blur. You might already know what I'm talking about. The tricks are used in movies like The Graduate (1967) and Citizen Kane .  To show the first effect I created an artificial image using Inkscape. Original   Vignette . According to Wikipedia vignetting is a reduction of an image's brightness or saturation at the periphery compared to the image center . Vignetting helps directing the viewer into your slide. You can create this effect using the GIMP of Photoshop. Basically you just make an oval selection around the object of in

Visual examples: remixing a math presentation

Designing math visuals is tough because of the level of abstraction. In this visual example I remix 5 slides of a math presentation.  I illustrate a way around the level of abstraction and show how to reduce to information per slide. In the past couple of days I have been working on remixing some slides of a math presentation. It is a project I have been wanting to do for a long time, and I'm happy I finally did it! The original presentation is called A short course on: Preconditioned Krylov subspace methods by Yousef Saad. You can download the presentation here .  Don't let the title scare you! Understanding the content is not important in this case.  I encourage you to download the original slides and compare them with the remix below. I've chosen this presentation for three reasons. First, it is a classic example of average visuals in scientific talks. Second, I know the topic, so I could be sure I knew how to remix it without making (hopefully) content mistakes. Th

Tech talk: 3 Applications to help you boost your slides

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Slideware doesn't always offer the right features to visualize presentations. In this post I present  Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, 3 free multi-platform applications to take your visuals to the next level.   Slideware offers limited features to create that diagram that you want, or to manipulate that image in the way you want.  But you don't have to settle for that ugly looking diagram or unwanted photo effect, let the multi-platform Open Source Software help you. Maybe you have heard about The GIMP, which is a similar application to Adobe Photoshop. If you haven't, take a look here .  Gimp is free and runs in Windows, Linux, and Mac ... and it is powerful. It is so powerful that it can be intimidating. From all of the free resource to learn how to use it, or to bring it to the next level I recommend these two sites: Grokking the GIMP is a book available online and can be downloaded. Meet the GIMP is an excellent blog on GIMP with tutorials and articles. If you

Silence

It is is been a while since I last wrote here. If you are a regular reader, you might have ask "Hey, what happened?" The silence has caught your attention. Pauses in a presentation work in  the same way. Making a pause forces the audience to focus on you. Think about it, even if the person on the back reading email will look at you asking himself if the talk is over. There is your chance to relaunch and engage him or her in your presentation. A pause is a powerful attention-grabbing tool, so use it, pause.

On introductions and vocal delivery

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Keeping the promise of elaborating on delivery I give two examples  of scientific talks. If speaker have awareness on their vocal delivery, their talks would immediately improve.  Continuing the theme  better shown than tell , I look at Columbia University  physicists Janna Levin's 2011 TED Talk The sound of the universe makes (click here to go there). In particular, I look at her introduction  which takes roughly one minute.  In these  74 seconds there are 188 words, here is the transcript (I added the times with an offset of -15 s): I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light. We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes. The Sun burns our peripheral vision, we see light reflected off the Moon, and in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe (0:30) has come to us through l

Visual examples: Multimedia learning

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I'm helping a friend with the visuals of a lecture on Multimedia learning based on the book of Richard Mayer of the same name. I asked if I could use some of the material to post here, so here we go: 2 traditional views of the learning process. Information aquisition (IA) + knowledge construction (KC). IA is better explained by the empty vessel analogy: The brain is an empty vessel and information is poured into it. KC refers to the sense-making process of the information that is presented. Ideally, good multimedia leads to KC allowing the learner to remember and apply the learned material. Traditionally, in the design of multimedia, this 2 concepts clash. An example is extraneous processing overload. Extraneous process overload is likely to occur when the lesson contains attention-grabbing irrelevant material and/or when the lesson is designed in a confusing way.  Avoid redundancy, i.e., presenting multimedia material in spoken text, printed text and pictures is likely