Better Scientific Presentations

The use of text in slides is overused, almost abused. In this post I go through two useful principles to improve the use of text in your slides, namely the 6-words-per-slide and 10-20-30 principles.    There is a lot to say about the use of text in a presentation deck, but this is for sure: Minimize the number of words per slide. In this e-book Really Bad PowerPoint,  Seth Godin suggests to use a maximum of 6 words. In the clip below, former Apple Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki talks about his 10-20-30 principle. The 30 stands for 30pt (pt = point) as the minimum font size in a slide. To make this rule more precise take a look at the image below. Both sentences are written in 36pt, but one sentence is bigger than the other one (click on the image to enlarge.) Conclusion? Not only does size matter, also type matters (no pun intended!) John McWade from Before&After Magazine  suggests to look for types that contain simple lines have large counters and wide openings little o

You might be willing to include images in your next presentation, but might be confused to know where to start. In this post I give a provide resources on where to get free images, how to choose good images and how to process them to fit your needs. Sadly, I forgot to take my camera to Paris. You got to love Wikipedia! I'm back from a (long) summer holiday in partly Paris. I was really  impressed by the quality of their advertisements. I was in fact so impressed that I'm  again immersed in graphic design and photography. So I thought I would write about photography resources: where to get free photos, what makes a image good for a presentation, and some tips on how to improve those free photos to get them to work. Where to get free but good images? I have mentioned this place already, but it so good I'll mention it again. Compfight is a Flickr search engine that filter images according to their license, either commercial or creative commons. So people already