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Showing posts from April, 2012

On why I hate LaTeX/Beamer

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Continuing with a last's year post, I make a case in point about how using LaTeX/Beamer is bad for scientific presentations.   Last year I wrote about LaTeX/Beamer and how it was worse than bad PowerPoint. One or two weeks ago I found a presentation on Slideshare done in Beamer, by people I know. They are excellent scientists at Germany's best research center. It is partly not their fault, they are applied mathematicians, and in mathematics LaTeX and, to a lesser degree Beamer,  are industry standards. The problem of using Beamer for scientific talks is that it employs the same narrative of a written essay: Title, introduction, first section, second subsection, conclusion. Another problem is that Beamer enforces the use of off-the-shelf templates, and the command-line nature of Beamer makes its customization very time consuming. The use of predefined templates one of the causes of  the death by PowerPoint. The creation of a math talk using Beamer is a soporific bomb. To sh

A good title visual makes a good first impression

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A good title slide helps you and your audience. In this post I give an example of how to build such title slide using Gimp.  After you have worked on the content of your talk, practiced it and got feedback, you might want to go for a great title slide. This slide helps the audience anticipate what kind of talk they will be listening to. The title of the talk, its author(s), and its(their) affiliation(s) are more than enough. Think about it, your audience how the name and date of the conference they are attending, why would you want to remind them about it? For me, the title of the talk is enough. Restraining to that amount of information helps to work on a great visual. So here is an example. The image below is from Wikipedia's Picture Of The Day (POTD) collection. Wikipedia's POTD January 1, 2012 Based on this awesome image I create this title slide. Let me walk you through how I got from this POTD to this title slide.  First, download the image in its full re

Selected slides from An inconvenient truth in slideshare

An inconvenient truth is a documentary film about Al Gore's climate change presentation. I just found out that some of his presentation slides are posted in slideshare. No,  Mr. Gore did not design the slides and presentation all by himself. Duarte Design helped him. I strongly recommend, that you check  out the slides. They are very good example of great visuals, and they can even be downloaded, though as a Apple Keynote file. Al Gore - Select slides