Better Scientific Presentations

Before After Sometimes scientific presentations include screeshots and text is highlighted by drawing box around it and either filling it it blank or a semi transparent fill. In fact, yesterday I was just about to do that but then I decided to open Gimp and  apply some layering techniq ue . The results? For black text the natural option is the Addition Layer. For the blue text HSL Color works best. Here is a quick run down. 1. File > Create > From Clipboard 2. If the layers dialog isn't showing press Ctrl + L  or in Mac Command + L.  3. Create a new transparent layer Shift + Ctrl + N or in Mac Shift + Command + N. 4. If the toolbox dialog isn't showing press Ctrl +  B and click on the rectangular select tool or press R. 5. Make sure the newly create layer is selected. In it draw a box over the text you want to highlight. You don't  need to be so precise. 6. Open the color picker dialog and select the highligh color. After you are happy with your selectio...

You probably know I hate presentation templates. However in last couple of months I have found myself not only using them, but creating them, I have been blown away with what  I have been able to achieve. There is a caveat, my own templates have only one master slide, and it is a blank one. That is all you actually need from a template: one single blank master slide. There are 3 things that blank slide has. A font family, like Roboto. A background color. A color palette. Here is an example: I like Roboto for 3 reasons: It is free, it is professional, and it has enough styles and glyphs. I have been starting to use Keynote's Color Palette just a few week and it has helped me speed out my work and keep my work consistent.  Mini-tutorial 1. Getting down to only 1 master Slide 1.  Let's start from with a default template, say "White".  2. Click on Show Master Slides. 3. I have added the Rule of Thirds to my white template for better placem...

One big and difficult question designing visuals is which colors to use. Using images makes this question easier to answer. In this post I show three pragmatic ways to do this including using Adobe's free tool kuler.  Source: Flickr Most visual decks need a aesthetics improvement, and getting the slide's colors right when it contains a photograph. This is not an easy task, so how to approach this pragmatically? Right off the hat, one fast solution is to  randomly select the colors from the photograph using the color picker (also called the eyedropper ) tool. The eyedropper tool is found in every slideware, e.g. PowerPoint, and also in gimp and Photoshop.  Another solution is to pixelize the image. In gimp open the image and in the image menu go to filters → blur → pixelise. The bigger the pixel block, the less colors you get to choose from, but the more homogeneous they get. As an example I'll use an image of a red wolf from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service digit...