- The way you convey information is as important
as that information itself.
Having built your outline, how do you take that
and design your slides?
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- When you're thinking about your slide design,
the most important concept by far is clarity.
If somebody is confused looking at your slide,
it doesn't matter what's on it,
you're losing the impact you can have.
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- You have to think about the fonts you're using,
you have to think about the size
of the font you're using, the colors.
- Depending on the room size, there could be people
really far back, and it can get really hard to see
complicated data figures,
and small font, and less contrasting colors.
- You should never use text blocks.
Don't go and grab a screenshot of your favorite paragraph
in the book and put in on your slide.
If you really need to put that kind of information
on your slides, make sure you use very short sentences,
maybe two or three bullet points,
very short bullet points, maximum.
- The best slides are ones where there is a single image
or set of images that are very related.
Preferably one or two pieces of data at the most.
And that anything that is on the slide is relevant
to your message.
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- Being very strategic about what your titles are
can enable you to use up less space on the slide
with other text, and it can really help you
make sure that your audience is following along.
I could choose to have a slide
for which the title was simply "Cancer metabolism,"
or I can have a slide for which the title is
"Cancer metabolism is altered in nearly 100% of tumors."
The title can help your audience follow along
with your conclusions or the main points
that you're making.
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- When we design figures for papers,
you know, there is a very different goal there
and a very different venue, than designing figures
for a presentation.
What are the minimum things that I can get away with,
that will convey my data in a way that my audience
can see and understand visually pretty quickly.
So if you're trying to show specific data points
on a graph, for example,
you can slowly animate those in.
You can use circles or arrows,
or any other kind of figures, or colors.
- Start with the simplest version of it
and then build on the complexity.
And thinking about maps, you might see
like the track of an animal, start with just that,
and then you might build on a layer that shows
what the forest structure might look like.
And then after that you build on a new layer
that might identify where some of the fruit trees are.
If you were to start with that last image,
that has the track, it has the forest structure,
it has the locations of fruit trees,
that's a lot to take in all at once.
But if you've built it step-by-step,
then people can see the initial image
and then they can move on and see the more complex version,
understand that and move on.
- If you do field work, like maybe you're studying
animal behavior or you're studying some kind of sound
that an animal makes,
I think it's really valuable to have audio or video
really illustrating that.
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- I have learned to use Illustrator and Photoshop
from online tutorials.
But these are definitely not the only softwares
that are available out there.
You can build your slides or your figures in PowerPoint,
or in Keynote, or in any other open-source software
you can find online.
- There's a world of different colors and font styles
that you can download.
Just google all formal Power Point presentation template,
Or font Power Point presentation template.
And you can import that into your Power Point slide
and use that as your format
for putting together your presentation.
And you'd be surprised how much a color change,
a font change will affect how your message gets across.
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- When using multimedia, make sure that you have
the rights and to mention the copyright holders
at the bottom of your slide.
- For published data if it's open access,
you can use that data as long as you cite.
When it's not open source, sometimes you will need
to request access.
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- It is important to acknowledge the work of other people.
- I've seen talks where if someone really worked
on an aspect of a project or did a specific experiment.
That individual's acknowledged within the slide
in which the speaker is talking about that.
- And I've also seen where people do it very nicely
at the end where they really highlight
the different groups of people who did different things.
- Your slides are the visual aid for what you're saying.
Make sure that everything that you put on your slide
helps the audience understand what you're trying to convey
in a very accessible and clear way.
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