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...

Designing math visuals is tough because of the level of abstraction. In this visual example I remix 5 slides of a math presentation.  I illustrate a way around the level of abstraction and show how to reduce to information per slide. In the past couple of days I have been working on remixing some slides of a math presentation. It is a project I have been wanting to do for a long time, and I'm happy I finally did it! The original presentation is called A short course on: Preconditioned Krylov subspace methods by Yousef Saad. You can download the presentation here .  Don't let the title scare you! Understanding the content is not important in this case.  I encourage you to download the original slides and compare them with the remix below. I've chosen this presentation for three reasons. First, it is a classic example of average visuals in scientific talks. Second, I know the topic, so I could be sure I knew how to remix it without making (hopefully) content mistakes. ...