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...

Last week I bought Numbers in Graphic Design by Roger Fawcett-Tang and it inspired this post.  In my experience the easiest way to start using pictures in slides is by using them to signalize the beginning of a new section. If the right name is chosen, the right picture might follow easy.  This is a creative task, and it needs time, specially if it is the first time it is done.  So let's say you have the names and the images. Now to the outline slide. First things first, do not put "Introduction" or "Motivation" on that outline, it conveys 0 (zero, null, cero) information. The same thing goes for "Conclusions".  Another thing specially for those LaTeX/Beamer users, subsubsection (aka nested bullet  points) in the outline, are you kidding me? You are killing your audience right at the start of your presentation. Who's going to remember that? The first example is a straight enumeration, to give a clue of the images I masks the section images wit...

The presentation of data in tables is a usual practice in scientific talks. Sadly, most tables are ineffective. In this first installment, I give a n example of before and after table design.  Writing about tables is something I wanted to do for long time, after all quantitative data is at the heart of science and its communication. Tables are ubiquitous, and if you are like me, you learned how to design them by imitation. The problem is, most tables suck, as illustrated in this quote Getting information from a table is like extracting sunlight from a cucumber. — Farquhar & Farquhar, 1891 By the way, I got this quote from Wainer, H. (1992). Understanding graphs and tables. Educational Researche r, 21, 14-23, as well as the images below. Tables should communicate, but instead they are used as a dump of tabular data, which the audience is supposed to  navigate through, understand and make sense of. Oh yeah, all of that in a couple of minutes. Let's dive in. Be...

You might remember professor's Jay Lehr 1985 article "Let there be stoning!" about the state of scientific talks. Inspired by it, I have been working on a slide stack about presentations . It is still work in-progress, but it has been a while since I posted some visuals, so here a sneak peek of it. Just a legal matter, all of the images under CC licenses and were taken either from Wikipedia or Flickr. The point of this example is to seek unity, a concept, among the slides. Keynote or PowerPoint templates provide a unity concept, at the expense of death by Powerpoint.  Getting to that unity has proved, at least for me, extremely difficult. Going through this stack makes me uncomfortable knowing that although there is similarity there is no unity. 

Source Wikipedia under CC license by Brandenands I have always been hesitant to write about typography because I have no formal education on it. However I can't keep quiet after what I have read and seen last week. Last week I found Emiland De Cubber .  He describes himself as a "full-time presentation lover and a part-time presentation designer." Certainly, Emiland's visual stacks stand out, but I disagree with his advise on typography and how he uses it. Now, I know I'm nobody in the Slideshare /presentation world, neither do I want or pretend to be.  I also know that in graphic design there is an entire world of styles. But I also know that design should be One and Universal, and that respecting the audience also means offering them type they can easily read.  So here is can I think about typography.  One single typeface is enough for one presentation stack I'm with Seth Godin in that a slide shouldn't have more than 6 (six) words,...

An inconvenient truth is a documentary film about Al Gore's climate change presentation. I just found out that some of his presentation slides are posted in slideshare. No,  Mr. Gore did not design the slides and presentation all by himself. Duarte Design helped him. I strongly recommend, that you check  out the slides. They are very good example of great visuals, and they can even be downloaded, though as a Apple Keynote file. Al Gore - Select slides

There are many lessons to learn from films, such as story-boarding, visual composition, and editing. Here is a quick trick to make your visuals moving forward through your talk. The trick is called "wiping" and in it you move from slide "A" to slide "Z" by wiping "A" with "Z", like this: The line between the two slide is meant to give a connection between them.  The connecting element is important it provides continuity.  This simple scene is made of two main elements: The transition itself and the connecting line.  Let me show you the details. 1.  The transition.  Although it looks like Z wipes A, The transition is done in A, it is called "Push" and it is done from right to left.  2.  The lines. Moving A from right to left and connecting it with Z means that the line is at A has to at least go to very end of the slide, in this case the slides are 1024×768 are therefore the line goes up to 1024. To keep the continuity,...

Last night while standing at the cashier's line a magazine cover caught my eye by their use of a circle. Allow me to explain,  sometimes magazine covers (and slides) use circles to add text to a photograph, like in the image below. Source: Flick Now, what I saw yesterday was a pointy circle, something like this: I think is this ingenious not only because it gets more attention, but also because it has more white space. An additional advantage is that straight lines make alignment easier. Trick number two. This one comes from the Periodic Table of Typeface , where the elements are not enclose in normal squares, but in "pointy round squares", something like this:   where all but the top right corner are rounded. If the stroke is bigger, the effect will be stronger.  Cool effect, not nothing more than eye candy. But we can modified it get a visual communication booster. Trick number three. What if we inverse the last effect and sharpen the round corners and roun...

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...