Download - Polish that presentation! 25 tips to bring clarity to your slides

Slide Optometry

http://flickr.com/photos/mr_john/3705255879/

KeithBradnam

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Copyright Keith Bradnam 2012

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_john/3705255879/


Bringing clarity to your slides

KeithBradnam

http://flickr.com/photos/mr_john/3705255879/

This is a talk about some simple things that you can do to improve your presentations.



Overview

There are many BIG things you can do to improve a talk

Big things can take time to work on. E.g. trying to turn your talk into a story, adding a beginning, middle, and end etc.


Some examples of ‘big things’ which are not always quick things to work on. This presentation is *not* about these types of presentation skills.


Rehearse!

Turn talk into a story

Separate talk into distinct sections

Give sufficient background

Give sufficient background

Be entertaining

Understand the science

Tailor the talk to the audience

Summarize effectively

Have very clear take-home messages Know what slides

are coming up

Speak with passion

Some examples of ‘big things’ which are not always quick things to work on. This presentation is *not* about these types of presentation skills.

There are many small things you can do to improve a talk

This is about small things, also known as...

http://flickr.com/photos/bobleckridge/7983214053/

The simple quick fixes that you can easily make to polish your presentations.

Low hanging fruit

http://flickr.com/photos/bobleckridge/7983214053/

The simple quick fixes that you can easily make to polish your presentations.

25 slide optometry tips

Ever been to the optometrist where they ask you “does it look better like this? Or like this? Is it clearer with this? Or with this?” Well this presentation will ask you similar before/after questions. Twenty-five pairings of slides with one type of alteration made.

Porcupine genomics

10/25/2012

http://korflab.ucdavis.edu

Do you like your slides looking like this?



Porcupine genomics

10/25/2012

HTTP://KORFLAB.UCDAVIS.EDU

Or like this?

There is nothing wrong with using black text on a white background. But it can sometimes get a little boring. Slide themes can often, but not always, enliven a dull presentation. Stay away from cartoonish themes or those that are very dated (e.g. yellow text on bright blue background).



PORCUPINE GENOMICS

10/25/2012


A nice bright, modern style. But could it be improved?



PORCUPINE GENOMICS

10/25/2012


Keith Bradnam

Better now?

I’m always amazed when I go to talks where people fail to introduce themselves and even omit their name from the title slide. This is the one slide that may be on screen longer than most (assuming you are ready to present while people are still arriving). Add your name!



PORCUPINE GENOMICS

10/25/2012 http://korflab.ucdavis.edu Keith Bradnam

Does it look better when you hide your name away in a corner?



PORCUPINE GENOMICS

10/25/2012


Keith Bradnam

Or better now, when it is center stage? Don’t be afraid to take credit for your work. You want people to remember you, and letting them see your name is the first step.



PORCUPINE GENOMICS


Keith Bradnam

Don’t clutter your title slide with logos for every affiliation that you worked with or who funded you. If there was an important collaboration between different institutions, then maybe that merits a separate slide to highlight the fact.



PORCUPINE GENOMICS


Keith Bradnam

This is a cleaner slide, but I’d still prefer removing my departmental logo altogether. The two important things on this slide should be a) who I am, and b) what am I going to talk about.



PORCUPINE GENOMICS

Keith Bradnam

A clean title slide, but is this the best that it could be?

PORCUPINE GENOMICS

Keith Bradnamhttp://flickr.com/photos/artbandito/18090396/

For most presentations, you should be able to find a pleasing image that relates to your talk. People respond well to images. If you work on any plant or animal, then you almost certainly should have no trouble finding something suitable.

Here I use a freely licensed image from Flickr’s ‘Creative Commons’, a great collection of images for all occasions (attribution usually required).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hazelbroom/56479885/


Species included in this study

Mouse (Mus musculus)

Pig (Sus scrofa)

Cow (Bos taurus)

Elephant (Loxodonta a!icana)

A neat, bullet-point list. What’s so wrong about this?


http://flickr.com/photos/randomreality/8093539/

http://flickr.com/photos/the_farnsworths/4720850597/http://flickr.com/photos/danielrowe/5743445752/

http://flickr.com/photos/thelivelygirl/5261389796/

When everyone on the planet knows the animals in questions, perhaps you don’t need to add their names. Instead you could just find some great images to highlight what you work on.













Same slide as before, but could it be simplified any more?












Some slides don’t really require any form of title. People sometimes feel obliged to add titles to every slide because that’s what the presentation software prompts you to add. However, if you have many people in your audience that are not native speakers of your own language, having text can help people more easily follow your presentation.









Winter

http://flickr.com/photos/marcusramberg/89760576/

Simple image. Could it be made worse?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcusramberg/89760576/


Winter

http://flickr.com/photos/marcusramberg/89760576/

Adding a simple border to images can be useful when your image doesn’t have much contrast with the background of your slide. This is one of these things where it might look okay on your computer screen, but lose all contrast when sent through a projector.



Computing resources

A simple image. How can we make it look more lifeless?

Computing resources

Adding a drop shadow to images/objects gives them depth and makes the slides just a little bit more interesting. Without the drop shadow, the slide now looks very flat. You can easily alter the degree and angle of drop shadows.

Computing resources

The same image as before. Can we improve it in anyway? Do we need that white background?

Computing resources

It it not difficult to subtract the background from images (in Apple’s Keynote, it is one click on the ‘Alpha’ tool to do this).

Go Ags!

A simple image, with a minimal drop shadow. Let’s make it a million times worse

Go Ags!

If you take a small image and enlarge it in your presentation software, you will end up with a pixelated image that will look horrible. Never increase the size of the images beyond their original size. Instead, find a higher resolution version of the image.

Puppet showand Minor Groove

Sometimes we have photos/images that contain extraneous components at the edges.

Puppet showand Minor Groove

Now we have cut out the cruft! The basic point here is that you don’t have to present all of an image. You can crop it or mask it, to focus only on the parts you want to show.

THE MEERKAT GENOME

Keith BradnamA polished title slide, with simple title and author name. What more could you want?

The Meerkat GenomeKeith Bradnam

If you have an strong/beautiful/inspiring image, then consider breaking out of the usual slide format and make your image fill the entire slide (assuming it is high enough resolution). No photo attribution on this one because I was the photographer (taken at San Diego zoo).

Boyle’s law

“the absolute pressure and volume of a given mass of confined gas are inversely proportional”

There are many things that we might naturally assume are best written as a textual statement.

Boyle’s law

Volume

Pressure

Sometimes though, text can be replaced by a simple visual. In this case I created the graph myself.

Very important graph

0

25

50

75

100

200720082009

2010

Region 1 Region 2

The only thing better than including a 3D chart in your presentation?

Very important graph

0

25

50

75

100

2007 2008 2009 2010

Region 1 Region 2

Including a 2D chart! Scientific data should never be displayed in 3D, unless you have 3D glasses to see it. Portraying a 3D image on a 2D surface makes it very hard to accurately compare data series. This can be particularly offensive when using 3D pie charts. NO MORE 3D GRAPHS IN SCIENCE!

Very important figure

How can we make this graph potentially unusable?

Very important figure

Let’s change the data series to be barely distinguishable. Don’t ever use colors which are very similar. They make look very different on your computer screen, but projectors can sometimes display colors very differently.

The Korf Lab

Established in 2004

Twelve full-time members.

21 publications

Many diverse research projects.

Three things wrong with this slide. The bullet points are in several different font sizes, the second bullet point starts with a space character, and two of the bullet points end in a period. BE CONSISTENT!

The Korf Lab

Established in 2004

Twelve full-time members

21 publications

Many diverse research projects

Ah, we can breathe again!

What makes Keith very angry?

Many things can anger him

You should be aware of this

Easy to avoid this problem!

Nothing upsets me more than slides like this. Leaving all of those single words wrapping around to separate lines makes this slide very unbalanced and ugly.

What makes Keith very angry?

Many things can anger him

You should be aware of this

Easy to avoid this problem!

Now, I’ve simply reduced the title font a little and resized the bullet point text box. Now it looks calmer and more serene (despite the imminent death-by-Mummy-attack)

Important table

Person C00lness Force skills

Perl skills

H-index

Ian 6.023 4.001 135.423 44.0

Nigel 11.11 2.0045 -2.456 0.0

Yoda 86.321 2,234.5 28.242 52.0

Bieber -0.132 0.00001 -200.00 0.00

Tables with too many cells are not going to make for great reading by the audience. Are they going to be expected to look at every value? Do we need to show them all of those decimal places, or could it be simplified? Can we make the header row stand out a little bit?

Important table

Person Coolness Force skills Perl skills H-index

Ian 6 4 135 44

Nigel 11 2 -2 0

Yoda 86 2,234 28 52

Bieber 0 0 -200 0

Et voila! All very simple changes, and now the table is much more readable (well, before the changes it was unreadable). Personally, I try to avoid anything more than a 5x5 table, and even then I will ensure I patiently explain the key points from it.

Result from paper

Here is a figure that I extracted from a paper. I only want you to look at panel C, so I highlighted it in red. Don’t look at anything else!

Result from paper

Better now? If you only want to show one thing, then remove everything else. Also note that there is no need to see the ‘C’ from the panel label, so I drew a white rectangle over it to hide it.

Methylation patterns in rice introns

Another complex figure grabbed from a paper, which in turn has been grabbed from an online database. Look at all those tiny fonts, and hard-to-read coordinates.

Methylation patterns in rice intronschr3

12,956,000 12,967,000

Gene Os03g22570

Now I’ve tried clearing things up a little bit. I’ve added my own label to the x-axis of this figure. You can do the same for many graphs that you show where the original fonts are too small or unclear. I could — and perhaps should — also add my own legend to this figure to better explain the different colored series.

Growth of GenBank

Continues to grow exponentially

Shows no sign of slowing

Hundreds of billions of bases

Sequencing has become cheaper and faster Data from GenBank 2000–2005

There are so many things that are wrong with this slide. A 3D chart with old data, which has a title that is almost reproduced by the slide title. The bullet points do very little other than explain the data that should be obvious from the graph itself.

Growth of GenBank

number of sequences

number of base pairs

A different graph makes things simpler and clearer. I added my own legend, but even that could probably go. Let the data speak for itself!

Intron length vs positionYou can calculate the length of introns at different positions in a gene

There is a notable pattern of different lengths at different intron positions

First introns in particular are significantly longer than others

Downstream introns tend to have similar lengths and are shorter

Bradnam & Korf 2008: “Longer first introns are a general property of eukaryotic gene structure” PLoS ONE

Out of 500 species surveyed, 30 out of 36 species that had sufficient data exhibited longer first introns

Too many bullet points, and too many bullet points which don’t add to the story and just makes things needlessly complex.

Intron length vs position

First introns tend to be longer

Bradnam & Korf 2008: “Longer first introns are a general property of eukaryotic gene structure” PLoS ONE

30 out of 36 species had significantly longer first introns

Now, it is just focused on the salient points. Much easier for people to digest. As a general rule I try to avoid using more than 4–5 bullet points on a slide (and I try to avoid bullet point slides altogether).

I like cheese

Which cheeses do I like?

Havarti

Brie

Shaft’s Blue

a local cheese from California!

Roquefort

This slide starts off with a top-level bullet point and immediately moves to a 2nd-level bullet point. Do we return to the top level? No. In this case the first bullet point might as well be the slide title.

Which cheeses do I like?

Havarti

Brie

Shaft’s Blue (from CA!)

Roquefort

Simpler and cleaner, with no loss of information.

Assemblathon 2

Who will be the winner?

There is so much terrible clip-art in the world. It will only ever make your presentation look worse.

Who will win Assemblathon 2

http://flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/6323440907/

If you need an image, search Flickr Creative Commons for a stronger, more stirring, visual.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/6323440907/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/6323440907/

Just look at the difference!

100%

Coffee Water Milk

Stella’s liquid consumption

All numerical data should be shown graphically, right?

Just look at the difference!

Stella’s liquid consumption

Liquid Liters consumed per year

Coffee 50,245

Water 76

Milk 25

Well sometimes, the raw numbers tell a better story. When you are comparing numbers which are very different, a graph will never really capture the scale of the difference (unless you do some sort of log-transformation).

Background research

Keith’s breakthrough paper was in 1999

A collaboration with Ken ‘yeast genome’ Wolfe

G+C Content Variation Along and Among Saccharomyces cerevisiae Chromosomes. 1999, Mol. Biol. Evol.

There is nothing really wrong with this slide. But could there be a way to improve it up by adding an image that made things more interesting without introducing any clutter?

Background research

My first paper

Published in Mol. Biol. Evol, 1999

It doesn’t take much to think of ways of including simple visuals in your presentation that actually add to the content. In this case I, hopefully, reinforce that this is a real paper that actually existed. It also allows me to simplify the bullet points on the screen. I sometimes do a similar thing with screen-grabs of websites, to show databases that I used.

Summary

There are many easy things that you can do to greatly improve your slides.

All of the tweaks on the preceding 25 sets of slides took only seconds to apply in most cases.

5 things to remember

Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.

Hope you found this presentation useful!


i. We are visual creatures...use images





ii. Use good images. Look at Flickr Creative Commons






iii. Less is often more







iv. People remember good presentations







iv. People remember good presentations

v. Don’t leave slides to the last minute (it will show!)



Download - Polish that presentation! 25 tips to bring clarity to your slides

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