Presentations

Promoting your research successfully requires effective technical presentations. You find below my personal checklist for a good technical presentation.

Checklist

☐ Slide numbers
☐ LaTeX beamer 🠞 Google Slides
☐ Bullet point lists 🠞 Visualizations
☐ 1st slide: Title-only 🠞 Key visualization
☐ Last slide: Questions? 🠞 Top-4 takeaway visualizations
☐ Read Markus' presentation guide

Slide numbers

Slide numbers are necessary for effective note taking! They enable feedback in a reading group or after a general presentation.

LaTeX beamer 🠞 Google Slides

Latex makes it impossible to design effective slides. I personally never believed this, but after years came to the conclusion: Latex-based presentations are never visually effective! For whatever reason latex makes it so hard to design useful visualizations that it is close to impossible to have a appealing presentation with latex.

Use Google Slides, instead. While there are other good alternatives, our lab standardized on Google Slides to enable sharing of presentations.

Bullet point lists 🠞 Visualizations

Aim to visualize your messages. Humans brains cannot read and listen to voice at the same time, but they can follow visual input and voice in parallel. Hence, replace bullet point lists (if at all possible) with visualizations of the concepts you want to discuss.

1st slide: Title-only 🠞 Key visualization

Your key visualization should appear on the first slide. The first slide is the second most important slide in your presentation. It is visible for a long time before your presentation starts. A good key visualization (a) gets the audience excited to listen to your talk and (b) remains in their memories for a long time.

Last slide: Questions? 🠞 Top-4 takeaway visualizations

The last slide must repeat the key takeaway messages of your presentation. It is the most important slide of your presentation, as it (a) remains visible throughout the Q&A session and (b) is the last slide people remember. It must convey your core message!

• Never write Questions? or The End on the last slide.

• Using small pictures (screenshots of your slides or key figures) to remind the audience of key moments in your presentation.

Read Markus' presentation guide

Markus' guide on giving presentations is an outstanding 60-slide summary of how to design an effective presentation.