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Showing posts from November, 2011

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