Better Scientific Presentations

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

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.