Better Scientific Presentations

In her book "Resonance" Nancy Duarte writes about "killing your darlings" meaning that some times you have to discard some of your most beloved work and ideas in favor of  better presentation. In some cases, you have to throw all the work and start all over. Yes, it is a radical step. I would suggest weighting-in how meaningful the ging is before taking that step. Needless to say, I started working on design four weeks before the presentation and at the end I was tired. But the colleague I shared the stage with did a very good job. So yeah, so much work paid off. In this post I'll be talking about the process of discarding ideas and how iterating helps you achieve a better product. The first round was photography based. You have been seen before: Full width Single Element Image bullets Double spread Before we go on, one technical detail. The format is not longer 1024x 768 px (4:3) but 1920x1080 px (16:9). It gives a more cinem...

Transitions are problematic. Most presentation software come with more transitions than wanted. The people at Duarte already covered with in a series of videos called The Trouble with Transitions . The best transitions are the simple ones and are best used when used scarcely. Here is a small collection. I chose these because they are similar to small set simple cuts editors used when putting a film together. Dissolve Note that a slide can dissolve to black or white. The technical term is fade-out. Fading out to black is also known as black-out, and similarly fading out to white is known as white-out. Using a combination of fading out and in, might help the speak force a well deserved pause: This "white pause" is appropriate when the speaker ant to signal that the next topic is weakly coupled to the previous one. Move-in This might also be known as cover. Read below to see why… Push If the whote pause signaled weakly coupling, the push transi...