This site contains advice on how to tweak the content and aesthetics of slides so that your audience doesn't fall asleep or leave despising you.

Presentation content

The following recommendations are for a 20-minute research presentation.

Title slide: Title, your name, institution, and e-mail address if you think people would be interested in contacting you. This slide will be displayed as you are getting introduced. Don't read the text to your audience, unless you know that it contains people who clearly cannot read. Make sure you have an interesting photograph on this slide, too. [2 min (if your host is brief), 1 slide]

Introduction: Show some pretty visuals (photographs, SEMs, drawings, paintings, Quicktime movies, sound files) of your subject and get your audience excited about the "issue" or question; put your issue in the context of several already-published articles from the primary literature; summarize (very briefly) your past research, if any, on the topic; provide clear statement of hypothesis, and give "road map" of what you will talk about in the rest of the talk. Avoid slides with a lot of text. [2 min, 4 slides]

Materials and methods: Show more pretty visuals of your organism and justify (if you haven't already done so in the Introduction) why your experimental organism is perfect for addressing the issue mentioned above; show experimental equipment and methods (ideally including a photograph of a person doing something); show experimental design (with sample sizes); mention statistical analyses that were used and how they will address hypothesis. Avoid slides with a lot of text. [Approximately 2 minutes, 4 slides].

Results: First mention whether experiment worked (e.g., "90% of the birds survived the brainectomy treatments") and show some photographs that show interesting or comforting qualitative results (a surviving bird looking content); remind audience of specific hypothesis; present chart of data and explain whether hypothesis is supported; explore data (e.g., "I noticed something unexpected"); end with brief summary slide of main results. [7 min, 4 slides]

Conclusions: Discuss why your results are sound and interesting (convince audience, too); describe relevance of your findings to other published work; state relevance to real organisms in the real world; talk about future directions. If you have more than 1 slide that say, "Conclusions", rename the earlier ones so that the audience doesn't actually think you are concluding. [4 min, 3 slides]

Acknowledgements: I hate this slide, and you should, too. Ending a great talk with a laundry list of thank yous will put your audience to sleep, and will put a huge void in between your amazing conclusions and the questions from the audience. If you need to thank people, say it on an early slide (title slide, perhaps), and then mention specific help you received during Materials and methods section. [0 min, 0 slides]

Questions: Leave your conclusion slide up, so that your audience can refer to it. Audience will invariably want you to go back to Results slide X...so you should have a handy list of slide numbers so you can quickly jump to that slide. On Powerpoint, type the #, then return. [3 minutes]

Note: If you are giving a talk in a 60-minute time slot, practice your talk until it is approximately 40 minutes long (and with approximately 40 slides). What happens to other 20 minutes? You will probably be introduced 4 minutes late, your host will spend up to 5 minutes introducing you (more, if you are infamous), interruptions (questions) during your talk with bleed away 5 minutes, and then you will have 5 minutes at the end of your talk for questions, yielding a seminar that is exactly 59 minutes...which gets your audience back to their lives with a minute to spare. Although your host and perhaps several members of the audience may be willing to stay indefinitely to hear you answer questions, try to remember that the majority of your audience will become impatient if you drag the seminar beyond the one hour mark.

[Parting slide]: Optional slide showing "for more information" such as your e-mail address, laboratory web page, and suggestions for further reading (journal articles, books) for those interested.

 

General layout and design considerations

• Construct all slides in "landscape" orientation. This assures that the tops and bottoms of slides fit onto the projection screen and that view from the back of the room is not obscured by the heads of people sitting up front. If your image is inherently vertical, shrink it so that it fits horizontally (do not, as some have done, have separate presentations for wide and tall slides).

• Even with horizontally-positioned slides, try to keep the important information in the top 90% of the slide area. Often the bottoms of slides cannot be seen by people in the back rows because people's heads are in the way. This is not the case in all lecture halls, but if you are unsure of the room, or unsure of how tall the audience members will be, plan cautiously.

• Unless you have a lot of free time, it is usually advisable to construct slides in your presentation with black text (and black illustrations) on a white background. This strategy makes the task of printing handouts infinitely easier and far less wasteful of toner ink in laserprinters and photocopy machines (i.e., dark backgrounds use ink, a white background does not). And illustrations and charts are invariably first produced with black text and lines (e.g., the line drawing of an aphid, below), and conversion of all black elements and text to white involves substantial tweaking and fussing. Finally, when your background is white, you are ensured of at least some light in the lecture room, which is important in a lecture hall when you want the audience to be able to see your face or hand movements or want the audience to stay awake (Microsoft PowerNap is visual chloroform to many people these days, so brightness is an issue!).

• When the lecture room is completely dark, however, it is of course true that white (or light) text and drawings on a dark background improve clarity of the slide. A blue background (such as shown above, right) is particularly trendy (like bell bottoms), although you are urged to avoid electric blue (bell bottoms with diamond studs). Also, if you choose a colored background, be aware that certain text colors may not be discernible to people with some types of color deficiencies.

• Whatever background scheme you choose, just be sure not to mix the two within a single presentation or within a single slide (i.e., "don't cross the beams, Egon").

• If you have only a photograph on a slide, set the background of that slide to black.

• Choose your fonts carefully. Not all fonts appear "smoothed" when projected--Microsoft Powerpoint seems only to support smoothing for "TrueType" fonts (download some from Microsoft). When in doubt, just test some fonts on the actual presentation computer before your talk. Always avoid fonts with city names (e.g., New York); these fonts are not reliably smoothed in many applications. Non-serif fonts (e.g., Helvetica) are slightly more readable on the screen than serif fonts (e.g., Palatino). You can set font smoothing options in the Appearance control panel (ships with recent Mac OSs), the ATM control panel (an Adobe product that controls Postscript fonts), or by installing SmoothType, a recent release that seems to be getting favorable reviews. If you are having trouble with jagged fonts on-screen, see Adobe's Font-Smoothing Troubles page. Font smoothing is often a pain, but you should always make the effort to attain it--unsmoothed fonts give Powerpoint presentations a distinctly unprofessional look.

• Adjust font size so that that approximately 10 words fit horizontally (24 point is usually a good size), and line spacing so that only 10 lines would fit per slide. Naturally, if a slide contains scanned text as part of a scanned illustration, be sure that the font size is comparable to 24 point ... or be prepared for the audience to squint and whine.

• Do not use more than 2 or 3 typefaces in a presentation.

• Your audience will read 100% of the text on a slide, so delete any text that is not essential.

• If your research area is fond of abbreviations, don't assume that the audience will remember for more than 2 slides what DDCP-2A' or URAQT signify. Remind the audience verbally or put a "definition bar" at the bottom of later slides so that even people who slept through the earlier slides will have the ability to follow your presentation if and when they wake up. In fact, avoid using abbreviations if at all possible--save them for the manuscript, which is more likely to be read by people in or near your research area.

• Use italics instead of underlining.

• Avoid using strings of all capital letters in slide titles (and elsewhere). Strings of all capitals are very difficult to read quickly, and also obscure information inherent in allele names (e.g., Adh) and other nouns that possess mixtures of capitalized and uncapitalized letters (e.g., rDNA, species names). For example, compare "THE FATE OF ADH MUTANTS IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER POPULATION CAGES" and "The fate of Adh mutants in Drosophila melonogaster population cages." In addition, "all caps" is usually interpreted as the print equivalent of YELLING!

• Similarly, not put slide or figure titles in "title" case. Usage of 'title" case hinders a reader's ability to quickly process textual information. Compare "Effect of Cheap Malt Beverages on Adh Expression in Wild Type and Mutant E. Coli" with "Effect of cheap malt beverages on Adh expression in wild type and mutant E. coli."

• Do not include repeated banners, logos, or backgrounds (they are often pretentious, always distracting). Really. If you have some unquenchable desire to use a logo, restrict its placement to the "Title" and "Parting" slides.

• Do not use transition fades, bouncing text, or swhooshing noises. Although some in the audience will politely chuckle, most people are silently cringing with pity and horror. Using these gimmicks is simply an unstated admission by the speaker that the topic is uninteresting, or that the presenter does not think of himself/herself as a strong public speaker.

• Do use animations of images when movement is actually part of your research. Perhaps you are studying sprint speed of red and green lizards, and have good photographs of each: animating these images to move across the screen at different speeds would be an amazingly effective way to express results to a sleepy audience, though you might want to retain the bar graphs, too (or you could have a chart timed to appear after the lizards are done running).

• For true animation (see poor example), you will first need to compose in a program that is capable of producing "animated GIFs", and then find a program that can convert the file to a Quicktime format. Powerpoint may eventually have the capability to show GIFs, but I'm not sure when this feature will be introduced. You can also approximate the effect within Powerpoint by simply placing a series of images in consecutive slides, and then advancing through these slides at a good clip (you can even specify that you would like Powerpoint to advance a specified range of slides at, say, 10 frames/second).

• Time-lapses using a series of scanned photographs can also be constructed with GIF-building programs (see another poor example). Again, however, this file would need to be converted to Quicktime before it could be used in a Powerpoint presentation.

• Do import movies--audiences these days assume that if you are using Powerpoint, that you must have a great movie hidden amongst your dry text and chart slides. For inspiration, see Quicktime movies (compile from a simple internet search) of clavicle motion, Borrelia movement, tour of leaf primordium, DNA, frog oogenesis, plant circadian rhythm, and lizard sex. If you think there might be a movie already out there that you would like to borrow, try searching with a multimedia engine, such as Lycos (set option to "video"). When using more general search engines, include "Quicktime" and "movie" along with the words specifying your quest. There are thousands of biology-related Quicktime files out there, so be optimistic. If you want to make your own, use either the Sony Mavica (which produces 20-sec movies at a fairly good resolution) or the digital movie camera, which has all the bells and whistles. Also, if you have normal VHS tape, you can digitize segments over at the Faculty Resource Room. You can edit your work with Apple iMovie. Talk to Matt Powell (mpowell1) for specifics and equipment check-out. Bonus points for anyone giving who can seamlessly work this movie into their seminar (demonstration of bone stress, perhaps?).

• Do use sounds if they are integral to your research. Xylem cavitation, bird song, bone shattering and such would be great additions to a talk, and would eliminate the often problematic use of external tape players. You can set options for each sound, and have the sound-activation "icon" show next to photographs (e.g., "listen to the sound of the femur failing, again, and now compare that to massive skull trauma").

• Avoid, if possible, mixing green and red on a figure--members of your audience may be red/green colorblind, the most common type of colorblindness. Other deficiencies include the inability to distinguish yellow and blue (which is another reason why yellow text on blue background is an undesirable color scheme) and complete inability to distinguish color. If you would like to see how a colorblind person views an image of yours, you can get a trial Photoshop "filter" (Colorfield Insight) which simulates a variety of a conditions affecting your rods and cones. Colorblindness of some sort affects 32 million Americans--it is distinctly not rare, especially among white male audiences. (Read up on colorblindness.)

• Use figures instead of tables whenever humanly possible.

• Graph titles are not appropriate for laboratory write-ups and manuscripts, but they are fine for slides:

Example graph (data from the Gallup Organization).

• If you can ever add miniature illustrations to your graphs (e.g., as above), do it! Visual additions help attract and inform viewers much more effectively than text alone. Tables benefit from this trick as well.

• Most graphing applications automatically give your graph an extremely annoying key that you should quickly delete if you can directly label the different elements instead (as above). Interpeting keys is sometimes very difficult, and you should do anything in your power to make your graphs easy on the brain.

• Use colored arrows to direct audience's attention to particular parts of charts, especially for complicated figures. For figures created in charting programs and then exported to Powerpoint (e.g., via a JPG or EPS file), make sure that the output fonts and line widths are legible once the image is scaled within Powerpoint.

• If you have a complicated chart, it's a good idea to add statistics directly onto the chart. For example, if you have conducted an ANOVA and some post-hoc comparison of interest, you might use lines with arrows to indicate which means are significantly different from each other. Next to the line you can say, "means sig. diff." You can give further details orally.

• Orient the y-axis label to be horizontal (e.g., the "Growth per week" in rat slide below) whenever you have the space. Vertically-oriented labels are substantially harder to read, and often require the audience to tilt their heads (which tempts them to sleep, I suspect).

• Never display two-dimensional data in three dimensions. Doing so marks you as novice.

• If you have a photograph that you would like to scan and include, be aware that the maximum resolution you would need (for an original image sized 11.25" wide and 7.5" high, the dimensions of a Powerpoint slide) is 72 dots per inch (dpi).

• If you scan a small image (e.g., 1" square) adjust the scan settings so that your final scan file is approximately 1.5-2.0 MB (e.g., your scan will be at some resolution far greater than 72 dpi). In Photoshop, adjust your image size under Adjust:Image (with "Resample image" turned off) so that the image is 72 dpi; turn "Resample image" back on; then limit the file to be no larger than 11.25" wide or 7.5" tall (the limits of a Powerpoint screen). In doing this your saved image (JPG or PICT format) is optimized for Powerpoint and should rarely be larger than 300k.

• Because projection resolution is currently so poor, try to keep scanned illustrations as large as possible, especially if you wish the audience to read the finer print. A very common error in Powerpoint presentations is to shrink scanned illustrations (e.g., the citric acid cycle) so that a really large title can be included at the top of the slide. Just omit the title and expand the drawing to the limits of the slide dimensions. You'll be glad you did.

• If you overlay text onto a scanned image, apply a shadow to the letters so that the words are legible in both white and dark portions of the figure.

• Refer to more gratuitous advice on text formatting and word choice if you are concerned about your written style within a Powerpoint presentation.
  

Delivery

• Stand at the front of the room, not at the back near the projector. This might seem obvious, but in my experience it is not.

• Do not rely on your notes: the room may be too dark, and it is irritating to the audience.

• Try to look at your audience, not at your slides, as you speak.

• Do not keep "checking" to see whether a slide is still there. It almost invariably is.

• Do not read your slides to your audience.

• When verbally referring to a specific portion of a slide, use a pointer to briefly orient the audience. Or, just use your finger.

• When using a pointer or your finger, it is best to physically touch the image on the screen rather than situating the pointer in the projection beam to throw a shadow.

• When you are not actively using the pointer, do not distract the audience by playing with it.

• A stick or a finger (yours) is almost always better than a laser pointer (the projected dot is generally too small on cheap laser pointers). Laser pointers are, however, excellent cat toys ($7.99 at Targét).

• If you must use a laser pointer, do not blind people by directing the beam in their eyes.

• Do not chew gum, fiddle with your jewelry, or wear a hat -- even if these things comfort you or are critical components of a carefully constructed persona.

• Do not put your hands in your pockets. If you are likely to forget, fill your pockets with pushpins beforehand. Or wear a pocketless skirt (guys, this is not really meant for you).

• Do not draw more attention to bad slides by apologizing for them.

• Resist puns, obvious jokes, and overly rehearsed humor. Really. Good jokes are fine, of course.

• Minimize your use of the crutches, "OK,""like,""um,""er,""sort of,""ya know," and "kind of." Especially "like." It's sort of like, you know, when you use lots of filler words, it's, like, people totally don't even listen to you anymore, and, well, kinda sort of think you're dim. Bored audience members have been known to actually record the number of "likes" in talks.

• Etc. is pronounced, "Et cetera," rather than,"Eck cetera." It's true!

• Adjust your speed or ask whether there are any questions when you notice confused looks.

• If people in the audience start closing their eyes, it is a sign that you are boring them. Speak up and become more dynamic.

• When responding to questioners with faint voices, repeat the question loudly for the benefit of all. It's a strange but true fact that older people, especially those with bad hearing, often sit in the back rows, so make this a habit for all questions.

• Attempt a response to all questions even when you think there is an audience member who might be able to field it better than you.

• Use Powerpoint for Macintosh. Although transferring a Powerpoint for Windows file into a Mac version is possible, it invariably is full of errors.

• Check to make sure that your slide show runs on the computer that will be used on the presentation day. Certain types of embedded graphics cause some systems to fail, so this is not a completely paranoid concern.

• Make sure you understand how to control the lights and the slide projector (or computer remote) before you begin.

• If you want a blank screen to appear (for instance, to get the audience's full attention), press the "b" on the keyboard (at least for Powerpoint).

• If the moderator does not end the question period in a timely fashion, say, "Perhaps I could entertain further questions outside?" People will cheer. If there is not a moderator, it is your responsibility to end in a timely fashion.

Moderating

• During the talk, if a person starts playing "air piano," find a way to stop them so that nearby members of the audience can focus on the speaker. Handing them a note that says, "Hey, Mozart, can you keep those fancy hands in your pockets during the talk?" is one option. Or, before the talk starts, ask people with annoying habits to please sit in the back, where they are less likely to be distracting to the rest of the audience.

• Similarly, if somebody starts compulsively clicking their pen several times per second, go to the offender and give them a writing instrument that doesn't click. Remind the person to take their medication before coming to talks.

• If the speaker starts to go beyond the agreed-upon stop time, stand up and situate yourself near the front of the lecture room so that the speaker gets the hint.

• If the speaker refuses to stop, pull out the taser. Usually just showing the device will be sufficient.
  

Useful literature

• Briscoe, M.H. 1996. Preparing Scientific Illustrations: A Guide to Better Posters, Presentations, and Publications, 2nd ed. Springer-Verlag, New York.
  
• Day, R.A. 1994. How To Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 4th ed. Oryx Press, Phoenix.
  
• Matthews, J.R., J.M. Bowen, and R.W. Matthews. 1996. Successful Science Writing: A Step-by-Step Guide for the Biological and Medical Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  
• Pechenik, J.A. 2006. A Short Guide to Writing about Biology, 4th edition. HarperCollins College Publishers, New York.
  
• Tufte, E.R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, Connecticut.
  

Useful links

"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (Edward Tufte)
"Death by PowerPoint" (flickr group)
"The use and abuse of PowerPoint in teaching..." (Allan Jones)
"Best Powerpoint slide. Ever." (Gary Turner)
"The best PowerPoint presentation ever" (Doug Zongker)