Better Scientific Presentations

The use of clipart in presentations is usually not advised. However not all clipart is bad. In this post I talk about how Silhouettes and Outlines can be good for slides. This topic seems to be a complicated one, but it isn't. Presentations Pros are likely to advise us not to use clipart in our slides. I think we are wrong, or at least they haven't told us the whole truth. A better statement is " Bad clipart shouldn't be forbidden from presentations visuals, and good one should be used carefully" . Pros use top quality clipart like in Obama's State of the Union address 2011—SOTU 2011— ( click here to see it ) or in The clock is ticking on Long Island design by Duarte, so saying no to all clipart can't possibly be right. It is not to say that the camera on the left is bad clipart. There are different types of clipart, but not all are appropriate for slides. So what is good and bad presentation clipart? Source: clker.com The camera on the left is no...

Yesterday I watched this year's President Obama State of the Union address. Obama is a great public speaker and many books have been written about this, but that's not what I want to write about today. What stroke me this time was, that the visuals of the enhanced presentation, where not as good of the visuals from last year. So I went to slideshare.net to compare them, and I was right. The visuals from 2011 are superb! In 2012 the slides couldn't hold one concept, and because Unity is perhaps the tenet of graphical design, I wanted to share them here.  You can draw your own conclusions. The moral of this tale for me is that even pros have bad days.  2011 Enhanced State of the Union Address Graphics   State of the Union - Enhanced Graphics