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Showing posts from 2016

Big bold font!

Most scientific presentations failed, among many other things, because the font presenters use is too small. F. that! Ditch the small font size! In most cases the smallest font size should be 48pt . You are not writing on digital paper. You are writing on a canvas.  Oh, but I have so much to say! Good for you! Now go and break what you have to say into smaller pieces! Large font sizes has one immediate effect. You have to write less per slide. And with practice you might achieve using text as a graphic element some month ago I dissect an example of a deck u sing text as a graphic element .

How to choice and download fonts using Google Fonts

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When it comes to choose and download fonts for either PC or Mac two sites come to my mind: dafont and font squirrel. However, I don't like them. They are more worry about themselves than with the content they provide.  And there is Google Fonts (or GF, for short).  I used to hate this site because I could not find how to download their fonts easily. But recently, Google Fonts (GF) got a facelift, and I really enjoy using it now.  All fonts in Google Fonts (GF) are open source and free. Right now there collection has about 800 items. It might seemed difficult to choose from such a big collection, but  GF offers some tools to help us narrowing down our options. Custom Text Ok, this is nothing new, but what I really like is that you can with a single click set the custom text to all items in the list. Search for number of styles, width and languages The search navigation allows not only to filter for Category and sort by date, popularity and trending, but it also allows y

On displaying theorems in slides

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Last week, Freddy left this comment on  On why I hate LaTeX/Beamer : We have to think something about the theorem issue. If it is a mathematical presentation, the most important contribution is indeed a theorem. Think about a math thesis presentation: most results will be theorems :( and I replied I agree that in a math presentations theorems have a big role. The question is how you present them. As University of Manchester Mathematics Professor Nicholas Higham in "Handbook of Writing for the Mathemetical sciences write" writes "When you write a slide, aim for economy of words. Chop sentences mercilessly to leave the bare minimum that is readily comprehensible." Think about it, people may take their theorems directly out of their latex articles and dump them into their beamer slides without further thought. That is that Beamer fosters, but ultimately it Beamer is just a tool. As I wrote on the post, the responsibility lies on the person using it.   Let me

How to include sketches into slides

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Nobody who is working alone on its own presentation should attempt this. This post is intended for people what to help a close friend, a family member or the significant other. So there you have been warn. Having said that, keep reading. I have some cool stuff to share! For the last two weeks, I have been helping on a visual stack.  My frequent client described it as the best collaboration so far. We expanded on the "sketching theme" I wrote back in May of 2016.  Although you my client and I really like the results, I'll let the readers be the judge of it.  Here are some of the slides:   Untersuchungsziele  is german for Goals the of examination.   I traced an image of a dart I found on Wikicommons. We had used the image as-is before, but this time we need to fit it into the sketch style. Perspektivierung  or the Perspective one takes on a topic. Here we used show the real meaning of the word. Again, we recycled the idea, but this time I used Inkscape&#

Slide dissection: What Teachers make by ethos3

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Let's analyse three slides from Ethos3 's presentation  What Teachers Make We'll be looking at slide 1, 57 and 76. Slide 1 The font is Georgia Bold . The contrast ration of the font size is about 1:3 Consider this comparison between a Georgia bold M of size 36pt and one of size 108pt. The M on the right much bigger than the one on the left.  What you are looking at is not length but area, so the actual contrast ration you are looking at is 1:9. Let do its wireframe and overlay a Rule of Three Grid The text is centered, vertically centered that is. Look at 4 intersection points of the grid, The focus point 'Make' lays precisely on the bottom two. Not much to analyse there. Let's make a big jump Slide 57    The font is Gill Sans and Gill Sans bold. We see at least 4 different font sizes. Let's make a wireframe again.   This is one single object that occupies the entire slide. Although the object is tilted, text-heavy and asy

sketch, sketch, sketch

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I know, it's been a while. Last semester, the students did great podcasts. That is, great for their skill and prep time. So I'm dropping the idea of doing a podcast theme. This week, I had the biggest breakout in slide design for a scientific talk.  I included sketches for abstract diagrams, instead of drawing them using vector graphics. I love the result, and so did my client and the audience. It made the slides for personal, it freed me the slideware technology, and opened a whole new world of possibilities. What also  surprised me was how I could use vector graphics and sketches in the same slide. Here is another example: The incredible thing is I don't know how to sketch! All I did was boxes, lines, triangles and circles. But now, I what to learn more about sketching! Now I didn't sketch all of the diagrams. I downloaded some vector graphics, and use  line style that emulates a brush or a fountain pen: Icons from the noun project. Creative commons.