Making a good slide deck: Simple advice on text, figures, and design for scientific slides
Channel: Lars Juhl Jensen
Date: 2023-03-27

Simple advice on designing a scientific slide deck that avoids the common mistakes. I first briefly talk about PowerPoint and my distinct, minimalist slide style. I then talk about the root cause of the problem, namely that people put too much on each slide because the confuse number of slides with amount of content. Afterwards, I cover the two main problems with slides, namely text and figures. Having long sentences and bullet lists are a problem because the audience cannot read and listen at the same time. While slides with figures are a good idea, scientific presentations often have too many, complex, and small figures on each slide. Finally, I give some brief advise on slide design.

0:00 Introduction: blame PowerPoint, my distinct style, and traditional slides
0:40 Root cause: physical slides, 2 minutes per slide, and confusing slides with content
1:36 Text on slides: long bullet lists, cannot read and listen, reading from slides, and keywords
2:26 Figures on slides: figures are good, the problems with figures, and how to avoid them
3:36 Design: simple is better, employer templates, consistency, font, and color palette
4:16 Many right ways: alternative solutions, only figures, and photos as backdrop