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"This pdf file is for illustration purposes only. It contains the title pages and an extended excerpt of the complete Survival Guide. We have not performed any additional editing. So the bookmarks and the page numbering correspond to the original guide. The bookmarks can be used to navigate through the excerpt. In contrast to the complete guide there are no print limitations on this excerpt file. However, all our guides have large fonts in order to present to the reader a very readable screen when the pdf file is opened in the default magnification setting of Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. So, if you want to print this file, print two pdf pages on one paper sheet, or use ‘booklet’ printing. Enjoy. 1 On our website and in the full Survival Guides license agreements can be found. Anybody that downloads any of our products, including the excerpts, from our site implicitly agrees with our license agreements. 2 Version 1.1,Tuesday, November 14, 2006 18:16 Presentation Guide for Scientists 1st Edition Publisher: StringCat Ad Lagendijk Presentation Guide for Scientists 1st Edition version 1.1 Published by StringCat P.O. Box 92215 1090AE Amsterdam The Netherlands www.stringcat.com Copyright © 2005-2006 by StringCat, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ISBN-10: 90-8653-002-8 ISBN-13: 978-90-8653-002-1 All rights reserved ii To Truusje, Guido, Kristel, and Wouter iii This page warns you that in this excerpt file the next page is not a continuation of the previous page. 1 Nobody will be able to check the life status of your connection. 4 SlIDES I repeat the golden rule: “Keep it simple, and then even simpler”. Later on I will explain that whatever you do, when you start with preparing your sheets, start with the master slide(s). 4.A General structure 4.A.1 File size Try to minimize the size of your presentation. This has nothing to do with minimizing the number of sheets. It all depends on how large (in bytes) your figures and graphs are. Make small presentation-quality compressed bitmap files (like jpg) out of large bitmaps (like tif files) or out of large vectorized figures (like ps and eps). The size minimization will help in fast loading of your slide (slow loading is irritating for your public) and in fast saving during preparation. Small files will also help in prolonging the life of battery charge on your laptop. In the field of software engineering reusability is a paradigm. Structured 4.A.2 Reusability 50 computer languages as C++ are designed with reusability as major design goal. The ‘re-user’ can be yourself at a later point in time, or one of your group members. To make individual sheets reusable they must be loosely coupled. That is to say they must be usable without reference to other sheets. If you buy a cupboard or bed from a furniture shop your new purchase looks beautiful from the outside or front side. If you look, however, at the rear side, or under your new bed, you will discover a lot of not-painted, not-finished woodwork. The reason is economy: why spending effort (money) on something that no one ever sees. The same applies to digital presentations sheets. You can import oversized pictures, group, cut and paste and do ugly things with nontransparent boxes. As long as it happens outside the margins or below other drawing no viewer will ever notice the chaos. Yet this minimal, carpenter approach limits seriously the reusability. For another user your slide will look like one big mess. I have seen examples where people put the whole sheet in a title box. Even PowerPoint stupidly suggests 51 to do so in its template for new slides. It works, but it is awful, amongst other things because the Normal View is meshed up. Be disciplined and try to do away with the carpenter approach. If your colleague group members still use this messy practice, correct them. 4.A.3 Composition Composition is a matter of taste. My credo is the less there is on the slide the better. Out of mere stupid laziness many presenters when they discover during the preparation of their presentation that a slide gets full, start to reduce the font sizes, to reduce the line spacing, to reduce the margins etc. This leads guaranteed to disaster. Busy slides are chaotic, irritating, and poorly legible. Always use landscape format. In this case there is less danger of clipping. The disadvantage is that you are used to write text in portrait (as any book and journal has an aspect ratio similar to portrait). If you have to put on one sheet several objects that are logically disconnected, do 4.A.3.A Landscape 4.A.3.B Separators 52 what the newspaper lay-out people do: use separators, vertical or horizontal. These separators are thick, colored lines (use narrow filled line-less rectangles) By using a thick vertical separation line in the middle of your landscape slide you can still mimic portrait slides. Beware that the two parts (left and right) should be connected in content. And do not use smaller font size when you use this separation line. 4.A.3.C Plots The rule of thumb is put only one figure on a slide and have it occupy about one half to one third of the slide. The rest could be caption and explaining text. Only in this case the important 0-years-old eminence grise in the back of the audience can read your slides and might offer you a position at a prestigious university. 4.A.3.D Alignment A lot of the clutter can be reduced by aligning text and figures as much as possible horizontally and vertically and introduce separating lines. Of course, 53 much better is to spread it out over more slides. 4.A.3.E Margins Use the same margins for all the sheets of the same presentation. The more consistent you are throughout new presentation the less you have to change when you reuse an old sheet. 4.A.3.E.1 Top Do not use any margin at the top. Try to close up things at much at the top as possible. Even at the cost of cosmetic or composition quality. People sitting in the last rows will love you for it. 4.A.3.E.2 Bottom Use a large, to a very large margin at the bottom, dependent on the size of the presentation room. If the room has many rows (>15) and no inclined floor 25% of the bottom will not be visible (clipping) for 2/3 of the audience. In a very large auditory this 25% can be as large 50%. With the master slide you can force your self not to use a part of the bottom: put an attractively-colored band on the bottom of the master slide. 4.A.3.E.3 Left and right Left and right text margins should be used. It is ugly if text starts right at the 54 beginning and/or continues right until the right side (text is almost flowing off the sheet). 4.A.3.E.4 large left margin Use a very large left margin if otherwise the sheet becomes unbalanced (everything is on the left and the right is empty). 4.A.3.F Guides Use the guides (a movable horizontal and a movable vertical line) for all your alignments. They are very handy. Try to reset them both back to a default position after you have moved them to align something not according to your default. In this way you are always reminded of the default position of all text as you start designing a new slide. If you put your starting text there it will make transitions from slide to slide smoother for your audience. You should also use the guides to align text with figures. Try to align, horizontally as vertically, as many items on your slide as possible. It improves the symmetry and design, and makes the slide less busy as the eyes are guided by this alignment. 4.A.4 Credit 55 Credit is an important issue in science. You should always give credit where credit is due. It does not hurt giving more than due credit. Published papers are for eternity. Giving credit in papers should be done with great care. Presentations hardly live longer than a day. So you can give much more credit on your slides than in your papers. You probably know in advance who will be in the audience. Giving credit by only mentioning the work of a colleague, but not having his name on your sheet is not impressive. The praised participant knows that next time when you give your talk, when he will not be in the audience, you will not give credit to him. So put the credit on your slide. If the slide is part of your introduction say something like “Whenever I present this slide I notice that ...”. This will give your colleague in the audience the impression that you give him credit in all of your talks. If you publish your presentation (on a web site) or distribute handouts you must be more careful with undue or exaggerated credit on your slides. 4.A.4.A Full Do not put full references on your slide. Nobody will need those details. Nowadays with Google it is very easy to find the pa- references 5 per. So no initials, no pages, just the abbreviated journal and the year. Example: ”Smith and Johnson, Phys. Rev. Lett. (2005)”. High-impact journals can even be abbreviated beyond their standard abbreviations. Be careful with “et al.” if you know that the senior scientist belonging to “et al.” is in the audience. A solution in such a case is: “Smith, ..., and Johnson, PRL (2005)” 4.A.4.B Advertising Science is about discovering something and then publicizing it. And keep on claiming it. Your friendly colleagues in different parts of the world are very willing to take your discovery away. There are a number of tricks to advertise your own work in your own presentation. You should do it in a subtle way. As an understatement. Advertise your work, but do it subtly. You can, when you explain your work on a sheet, put in small (means you are modest) but still legible (yes, you are modest, but not crazy) reference to your own work. If the number of authors is small, put all the names there and abbreviate your own name to initials, and abbreviate the journal name to the absolute minimum. This is a real sign of class: “Belly and J.L., PNAS (2005)”. The only re- own work 5 quirement is that the reference is unique enough to find it with Google. If the explanation of your new findings takes more slides, put the referral there only once, on the first or last slide of the series. If you do it more than once people will notice the duplication, and they will assume that you do not have any other papers to show. 4.A.4.B.1 Web site At the end of your talk advertise your web site on the last slide. Make sure that all your papers are available there, with high-quality pdf files (not hyperlinked to journal web sites, just put the files there physically, and no Type3 fonts please). I assume you have bought your own relevant domain name for $25 per year (which is 5000 times cheaper than the lasers you buy every year). 4.A.4.B.2 Hyperlinks Nowadays credit and references are often given in the form of a uri (Unified Resource Identifier). Do not reproduce the uri if it is ugly and long. 4.B Contrast and colors In a disappointing number of cases (0%) the contrast in pictures and text 5 appearing on sheets of scientific talks is of poor, if not of horrible quality. Yes, I know PowerPoint let you use all kinds of colors, all kinds of grading, and a large number of other splashy visual effects. Whatever you do with colors, check how your slide will look in grayscales (black and white). It should still be clearly readable and visible. This is a good check on the quality of contrast. 4.B.1 Object colors 4.B.1.A Colored background A colored background is obtained by filling a closed shape, like rectangle or circle, with a uniform color. On top of this background a text is often superimposed. Be sure that the contrast is good (check with grayscales). In many cases (0%) I notice the use of colors with bad contrast. When you check the contrast, beware of the problem that beamers varies considerably in their color profile. So only if you are absolutely sure you have a safe combination of font and back ground. I have seen regularly (20%) speakers being surprised by the bad quality of the contrast of their own presentation (“there must be something wrong with this beam- 5 er” is a poor excuse coming out the mouth of a speaker.) 4.B.1.B Graded A graded back ground is a background, for instance the filling of a box or a circle, that changes color, horizontally, vertically, or both, or even fancier. On top of these background a text is superimposed. If the color variation in the background filling is too large the text will be poorly visible. The reason being that the color of the font is either light or dark, whereas the graded background varies usually from light to dark. There are two solutions if you do want to use a graded background: (i) either use a background that varies only the same type colors (from one dark color to another dark color, or from one light color to another light color. Or (ii) use the cumbersome solution, that you will find in many glossy magazines: also vary the color of the font, in an inverse way compared to the background. When you check the contrast of a font, beware of the problem that beamers varies considerably in their color profile. So only if you are absolutely sure you have background 0 a safe combination of font and background. 4.B.1.C Background A background texture has the same problem as a graded background: it has a varying contrast and will destroy the contrast with fonts and figures placed on them. In addition it is distracting. A texture should only be used if it reflects a real structure that you are trying to convey. For a background picture the same holds as for the graded background and as for the texture. But for a picture the situation is even more dangerous. Apart from destroying the contrast a background picture is always distracting. Never use it. texture 4.B.1.D Background picture 4.B.2 Slide background Every drawback of colored, graded or textured background of a shape holds also for the situation where the whole slide has this background. There is however an additional large disadvantage. Presenters get bored with their eternal white background and change it into for instance blue (very popular these days). Even if they are very cautious with contrast there always remains a problem. Invariably the presenters have to import figures, 1 graphs, and/or animations. The background serves as the canvas. However many of these imports will originate from situations where the background was white (for instance every scientific journal still prints its content as black on white). As a result all these imports have white boxes around them. And the desires result of a nice, homogeneous background is lost. It has become a hodgepodge. Use a very dull background for your slide. This will be plain white in many cases. 4.B.2.A Acceptable The only acceptable way of making your slide have a background different from white is adjusting the background of all your imported material on that canvas. That can be done with graphical programs where you can replace colors (it only works in practice if the background is homogeneous.) If you get bored with a white background you can also invert all colors. At least it has no patchwork. background 4.B.3 Dangerous colors Professionals in the graphics industry know that faithful color presentation is a nightmare. Each device, like printer, 2 beamer, monitor, or screen has a different color profile. These color profiles are adjustable, but using this feature requires years of graphics experience. Beautiful dark yellow on your monitor shows up us ugly light yellow on a beamer. There are number of dangerous colors. Yellow and orange belong to them. Fluorescent colors are always dangerous. When I say dangerous I mean to say that they mess up the contrast: fonts in these colors are hardly visible, or fonts on a background of these colors are hardly visible. Do not ever use them. Do not experiment with colors. I have seen presentations by established scientists that were contrast-wise awful. The speakers themselves are most surprised when they look at the screen: “Here at my laptop (pointing to their laptop to prove their point) the colors come out fine”. Do not experiment with colors. Contrast means a combination of safe dark color (black, dark blue, dark red) 3 and a safe light color (white, light grey). 4.B.3.A Default An additional problem with color contrast is that lots of computer programs (like plotting software) generate figures in colors with default colors that are dangerous. Always adjust these default colors. colors 4.B.4 Shadowing Special effects as shadowing, either of objects or of fonts, does not add any information and does not make your presentation more enjoyable. It distracts. Leave its use to the amateurs. 4.C Text properties 4.C.1 Font Many fonts are designed for printing purposes and not for screen reading. On the web you will see that sans serif fonts as Verdana and serif fonts as Garamond are very popular. Sans serif fonts are supposed to be better for screens. I leave it to your taste what you use in your presentations. It is very simple to use a font that is too small. Especially young researchers with excellent eyes use way too small font sizes on their slides. As a rule of thumb I 4.C.1.A Font size 4 ..."

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