One must give credit when due. Organizing Creativity’s Daniel Wessel pointed out to me on the previous blog post “Time to go analog” that this concept of starting your presentation as an analog process gets a full chapter (Chapter 3) in a book entitled Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.
In the previous post, I touched on key questions to ask yourself before preparing a talk. This sets the general parameters (audience, length, …). At this point it would be easy to just fire up Powerpoint or Keynote, shuffle through your previous talks, pick, mix and make modifications.
Instead, I suggest you go analog.
This is scientific meetings season, at least for me. This means a bunch of PPT presentations to prepare. It would be so much easier to just reuse an older presentation or merge past presentations. In fact, sometimes I feel that this is what is happening more and more often in these meetings. While I do use previously prepared materials, I always start by asking myself a few question key questions before even opening PowerPoint (or Keynote):
LaTex / TeX has been a favourite of scientists for a long time. For many, TeX typesetting is considered to be producing the most beautiful and elegant documents, in particular when equations are involved. On OSX, I used over the years tetex and TeXLive in the past. Nowadays, MacTeX appears to be a popular package.
Beside the beautiful and elegant documents it produces, LaTeX uses only ACSII characters. It is thus highly portable and fully compatible across platforms. Therefore, documents can be written in any text editor (from the lowest common denominator such as vi to more elaborate one such as Emacs. On OSX, you will find the beautiful Aquamacs version of Emacs.
However, collaborative writing in LaTeX might not be the most intuitive function of LaTeX/TeX packages. And while I do hate WORD, its visual change tracking system makes document sharing and collaborative writing quite easy (compared to performing a “diff” command on two files and so on…If you do not know what is the “diff” command, it further proves the point).
Welcome to the free WriteLaTeX online collaborative environment. This new service was pointed out to me recently by a colleague at my institution. It is a web-based service and thus cross-platform and fully compatible with tablets (either iOS, Android or Blackberry) and no need to install a standalone distribution. Your working space is 100 Mb with the possibility to increase to 1 Gb (in steps of 50 Mb per referral…). Figures in JPG, PNG and PDF are supported as well as bibTeX bibliography style. Furthermore, writeLaTeX let you do Beamer presentations as well!
This image was taken from the writeLaTeX website and shown as a example of the feature sets available.
If LaTex is still in your arsenal of writing tools, have a look at writeLaTeX.
Every meeting brings about few presentations for which the same mistakes seems to happen again and again. Just coming back from a major conference in my field, I can confirm it… again. Here is a few tips that can help make your presentation better with minimal work:
Contents
Don’t use the whole real estate space just because you can. A presentation is similar to a well done document in the sense that you do want margin all around and avoid putting critical information in those margin. Times and times again you see presentations for which information are missing, such as axis label for a figure to close to the border or even the complete bottom part of the slide which can only be seen from the first few front rows.
Don’t ever fill-up the slide just because you can copy and paste from a WORD document. Even worst, fill-up the slide and read every single words on it…
Do take your time and put a single “big” idea per slide. If a figure or table convey more than one idea, copy the slide or use an animation (first approach preferred) to introduce that new idea.
Do take your time to make sure that every slide contribute to your overall presentation “story.” If it doesn’t simplify by removing it. You want to be convincing and in that bring to audience to follow you in what should be an obvious conclusion.
From the previous two DOs, always DO start building a presentation by establishing first what will be your overall main message.
Do use precise words and short sentence(s). It is OK with having an empty slide or a slide with just an image or just a word or just a sentence. It is however not OK to have more than 45-50 words unless you are quoting some or something for a very specific purpose.
Don’t ever use fonts smaller than 24 pts. You want your slide to be easy to absorb even in that last row of the ballroom. As a bonus, this simple rule along with the use of margins will help you keep the number of words on your slide to a reasonable level 😉
Figures and Tables
That previous rule DO apply to figures and tables! Numbers and characters for axis and labels should never be smaller than 24 pts. Nothing worst than having that killer graph that 75-80% of the audience cannot even figure out because it cannot be read.
If your figure have many different data sets on it, DO alternate between open and filled symbols such as open square, black dots, open triangle, back stars, … Having x and + signs next to each other does not work.
Similarly, don’t ever use pale color for your plot lines or symbols: yellow, pale green, pink (yeah I have seen – or not – this), … This simply does not work. Black, blue, green (dark), red and combination of full, dashed, dot-dashed and dotted lines are plenty. By the way, since a good fraction of the population are color blind avoid contrasting two important data sets with red and green!
Do always present your figures, including X and Y axis before discussing the results. The time it take you to do this is also the time your audience need to figure out what is shown (if your figure is well-design based on the above rules); they are now ready to listen to what you have to say.
Don’t, never show a table that take a whole slide and have dozens of numbers. First it will be impossible to meet the 24 pts rule and second, most of the audience brains will simply shut off. My experience is that:
Other considerations
Don’t, never use pale font colors on a pale backgrounds: yellow on white is probably the worst of them.
Do use either dark font colors on a pale background ( black on white, dark blue on white, …) or pale font colors on a dark background (white fonts on a black background or white fonts on a dark red background and so on). You get the idea.
Do use and customize you master slide. This will ensure that you have always the same size and color title fonts, place always at the same spot on the slide, …
Don’t put your logos, e-mail, URL on every slides. This “over branding” behavior does not help you as it provides sources distraction while you are trying to engage peoples.
Do use your logos on the first slide with your name, title, …
Do also use your affiliation logos, financing partner logos, URL, e-mail on the very last slide (that will stay up waiting for question). Better yet, provide the audience with a QR code which can be your VCARD, an URL to your website and so on. This is clean, non-distracting and very useful.
One last thing
Do, always take the time to make sure that your presentation will come out correctly on the conference system. Going from Mac to PC or even on PC from one system configuration to another can give you a few surprises, especially regarding animations and movies.
Conclusion
The above covers the very basics stuff. We go over this “design” process with the students during group meetings and in preparation to oral presentations at major conferences. More in-depth tips can be found on this post and this one.
I would really like to hear out your useful tricks and tips.
It happens every so often that you might need to explain a complex concept or present a vast amount of data in a short amount of time. Why not, if applicable (and possible), present it as an animation or a movie!
In a previous post I have made a link to a spectacular presentation of Prof Rosling showing the worldwide evolution of household income as function of time. Loads of data, presented in a dynamic (animated) fashion. It works!
It is also quite possible that the data for any reason are too abstract or makes it difficult to grasp the significance until you “see” them. A good example of this has recently appeared on YouTube showing the break-up of the Greenland glacier over time. Again highly effective.
Over the past two years, a few of my students have used movies or movie-like animations to explain in less than 20-30 seconds very abstract and complex concepts at various conferences. While at first I saw this has a curiosity, it became clear very quickly that for their particular purposes, the use of such techniques have simplified greatly their scientific or technical presentations (usually 8 to 10 minutes time slots), decrease significantly the time needed for a detailed explanation and increased audience comprehension.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, do not underestimate the power of thousands of images… used correctly 😉
Ruminating... 