presentation advice
There's a lot out there written about preparing scientific presentations (poster or oral). Here I will link to what I think is good advice and will collate resources I have found useful.
General
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| Colin Purrington's poster advice | Must read. NOW |
| Better Posters | Good advice + critiques of posters people submit (also check out his e-book on presentation tips here) |
| Langin 2017 | Your presentation should be a story. This article describes the "and, but, therefore" framework. Definitely worth a read |
| Kevin Lafferty's oral presentation advice | The 'Outlines' and 'Delivery' sections are so good (so is the appendix) |
| Todd Reubold's oral presentation tips | Worth spending the 28 mins (especially before starting a presentation). Sound advice |
| How many slides do people really remember? | An actual study on what people remember from a powerpoint presentation -- interesting |
| All the 'Points of View' articles from Nature Methods | Good advice collection on data visualization |
| Remove to improve | Excellent graphing advice |
| Clear off the table | Excellent table-making advice (from the same guys) |
Color
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| Colour Lovers | Used it a lot for setting up slide color schemes |
| Material Palette | Another way of picking a palette |
| Design Seeds | And yet another way! |
| Pictaculous | Creates a palette from a photo |
| Excel Color Picker | Color selection help for plots in Excel |
Imagery
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| bioicons | Biology-focused collection of SVG graphics |
| The Noun Project | Excellent resource for simple icon graphics |
| PhyloPic | Similar to the Noun Project graphics, but exclusively of living critters |
| Resource cards | Great collection of photos, fonts, icons, textures, etc. |
| Creative Commons Search | All kinds of stuff under CC license |
| Medium's collection | Collection of stock photo websites that don't suck |
| Designskilz's collection | Same as above |
| Free Images | Good source of free stock photos |
| The Royal Society Picture Library | Sometimes old images come in handy |
| Background Burner | To quickly remove background from images |
Fonts
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| Typetester | Quickly check different fonts |
| Wordmark | See a word/phrase in a lot of fonts |
| WhatTheFont | If you need to identify the name of a font |
| Identifont | Another font ID tool |
| Google Fonts | Lots of fonts for download |
| DaFont | Lots of fonts for download |
| Font Squirrel | Lots of fonts for download |
| Abstract Fonts | Lots of fonts for download |
| The Big Book of Font Combinations | Excellent resource for pairing fonts (stop by my office if you want to see the book) |
Other
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| Wordle | Word clouds based on frequency of ocurrence (a bit overplayed now) |
| Tagxedo | Like Wordle, but with different options |
| Prezi | Some people swear by it, some people think it's terrible... at the end of the day, it's just a tool like PowerPoint or Keynote (but if you're going to use it, this is a must read) |
| Map-It | Good tool to create simple maps |
| Pulp-o-Mizer | You never know when you'll need to use something like this |
Old presentations
It helps to look at what other people have done and decide things you like and don't
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| ASLO 2011 | Short research presentation (~15 min) |
| SCCS 2010 | Extra short (4 min) research presentation - entirely in haiku! (proud of this one) |
| NYMSC 2009 | Poster |
| UOP 2015 | Another poster |
| MEEC 2022 | The 'social media' poster |