There are many big things that you can do to improve your slides. There are also many small things that you could, and should, be doing. This presentation shows some tips for easily adding polish to your presentations.

1. Slide Optometry
Keith
Bradnam
http://flickr.com/photos/mr_john/3705255879/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.
Copyright Keith Bradnam 2012

2. Bringing clarity to your slides
Keith
Bradnam
http://flickr.com/photos/mr_john/3705255879/
This is a talk about some simple things that you can do to improve your presentations.

3. Overview

4. There are many BIG things
you can do to improve a talk
Big things can take time to work on. E.g. trying to turn your talk into a story, adding a
beginning, middle, and end etc.

5. There are many BIG things
you can do to improve a talk
Some examples of ‘big things’ which are not always quick things to work on. This
presentation is *not* about these types of presentation skills.

6. Have very clear Turn talk
take-home messages into a story Know what slides
are coming up
Be entertaining
Give sufficient
background
Rehearse!
There are many BIG things
you can do to improve a talk
Summarize
Tailor the talk
effectively
Speak with passion to the audience
Give sufficient Understand
Separate talk into
background the science
distinct sections
Some examples of ‘big things’ which are not always quick things to work on. This
presentation is *not* about these types of presentation skills.

7. There are many small things
you can do to improve a talk
This is about small things, also known as...

8. http://flickr.com/photos/bobleckridge/7983214053/
The simple quick fixes that you can easily make to polish your presentations.

9. http://flickr.com/photos/bobleckridge/7983214053/
Low hanging fruit
The simple quick fixes that you can easily make to polish your presentations.

10. 25 slide optometry tips
Ever been to the optometrist where they ask you “does it look better like this? Or like this? Is
it clearer with this? Or with this?” Well this presentation will ask you similar before/after
questions. Twenty-five pairings of slides with one type of alteration made.

11. #1

12. Porcupine
genomics
10/25/2012
http://korflab.ucdavis.edu
Do you like your slides looking like this?

13. Porcupine
genomics
10/25/2012
HTTP://KORFLAB.UCDAVIS.EDU
Or like this?
There is nothing wrong with using black text on a white background. But it can sometimes
get a little boring. Slide themes can often, but not always, enliven a dull presentation. Stay
away from cartoonish themes or those that are very dated (e.g. yellow text on bright blue
background).

14. #2

15. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
10/25/2012
http://korflab.ucdavis.edu
A nice bright, modern style. But could it be improved?

16. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
Keith Bradnam
10/25/2012
http://korflab.ucdavis.edu
Better now?
I’m always amazed when I go to talks where people fail to introduce themselves and even
omit their name from the title slide. This is the one slide that may be on screen longer than
most (assuming you are ready to present while people are still arriving). Add your name!

17. #3

18. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
10/25/2012 http://korflab.ucdavis.edu Keith Bradnam
Does it look better when you hide your name away in a corner?

19. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
Keith Bradnam
10/25/2012
http://korflab.ucdavis.edu
Or better now, when it is center stage? Don’t be afraid to take credit for your work. You want
people to remember you, and letting them see your name is the first step.

20. #4

21. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
Keith Bradnam
http://korflab.ucdavis.edu
Don’t clutter your title slide with logos for every affiliation that you worked with or who
funded you. If there was an important collaboration between different institutions, then
maybe that merits a separate slide to highlight the fact.

22. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
Keith Bradnam
http://korflab.ucdavis.edu
This is a cleaner slide, but I’d still prefer removing my departmental logo altogether. The two
important things on this slide should be a) who I am, and b) what am I going to talk about.

23. #5

24. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
Keith Bradnam
A clean title slide, but is this the best that it could be?

25. PORCUPINE
GENOMICS
http://flickr.com/photos/artbandito/18090396/
Keith Bradnam
For most presentations, you should be able to find a pleasing image that relates to your talk.
People respond well to images. If you work on any plant or animal, then you almost certainly
should have no trouble finding something suitable.
Here I use a freely licensed image from Flickr’s ‘Creative Commons’, a great collection of
images for all occasions (attribution usually required).

26. #6

27. Species included in this study
Mouse (Mus musculus)
Pig (Sus scrofa)
Cow (Bos taurus)
Elephant (Loxodonta a!icana)
A neat, bullet-point list. What’s so wrong about this?

28. Species included in this study
http://flickr.com/photos/randomreality/8093539/ http://flickr.com/photos/thelivelygirl/5261389796/
http://flickr.com/photos/danielrowe/5743445752/ http://flickr.com/photos/the_farnsworths/4720850597/
When everyone on the planet knows the animals in questions, perhaps you don’t need to add
their names. Instead you could just find some great images to highlight what you work on.

29. #7

30. Species included in this study
http://flickr.com/photos/randomreality/8093539/ http://flickr.com/photos/thelivelygirl/5261389796/
http://flickr.com/photos/danielrowe/5743445752/ http://flickr.com/photos/the_farnsworths/4720850597/
Same slide as before, but could it be simplified any more?

31. http://flickr.com/photos/randomreality/8093539/ http://flickr.com/photos/thelivelygirl/5261389796/
http://flickr.com/photos/danielrowe/5743445752/ http://flickr.com/photos/the_farnsworths/4720850597/
Some slides don’t really require any form of title. People sometimes feel obliged to add titles
to every slide because that’s what the presentation software prompts you to add. However, if
you have many people in your audience that are not native speakers of your own language,
having text can help people more easily follow your presentation.

32. #8

33. Winter
http://flickr.com/photos/marcusramberg/89760576/
Simple image. Could it be made worse?

34. Winter
http://flickr.com/photos/marcusramberg/89760576/
Adding a simple border to images can be useful when your image doesn’t have much
contrast with the background of your slide. This is one of these things where it might look
okay on your computer screen, but lose all contrast when sent through a projector.

35. #9

36. Computing resources
A simple image. How can we make it look more lifeless?

37. Computing resources
Adding a drop shadow to images/objects gives them depth and makes the slides just a little
bit more interesting. Without the drop shadow, the slide now looks very flat. You can easily
alter the degree and angle of drop shadows.

38. #10

39. Computing resources
The same image as before. Can we improve it in anyway? Do we need that white background?

40. Computing resources
It it not difficult to subtract the background from images (in Apple’s Keynote, it is one click
on the ‘Alpha’ tool to do this).

41. #11

42. Go Ags!
A simple image, with a minimal drop shadow. Let’s make it a million times worse

43. Go Ags!
If you take a small image and enlarge it in your presentation software, you will end up with a
pixelated image that will look horrible. Never increase the size of the images beyond their
original size. Instead, find a higher resolution version of the image.

44. #12

45. Puppet show
and Minor Groove
Sometimes we have photos/images that contain extraneous components at the edges.

46. Puppet show
and Minor Groove
Now we have cut out the cruft! The basic point here is that you don’t have to present all of an
image. You can crop it or mask it, to focus only on the parts you want to show.

47. #13

48. THE MEERKAT
GENOME
Keith Bradnam
A polished title slide, with simple title and author name. What more could you want?

49. The Meerkat Genome
Keith Bradnam
If you have an strong/beautiful/inspiring image, then consider breaking out of the usual slide
format and make your image fill the entire slide (assuming it is high enough resolution). No
photo attribution on this one because I was the photographer (taken at San Diego zoo).

50. #14

51. Boyle’s law
“the absolute pressure and volume of a given mass
of confined gas are inversely proportional”
There are many things that we might naturally assume are best written as a textual
statement.

52. Boyle’s law
Pressure
Volume
Sometimes though, text can be replaced by a simple visual. In this case I created the graph
myself.

53. #15

54. Very important graph
Region 1 Region 2
100
75
50
25
2007
2008
2009 0
2010
The only thing better than including a 3D chart in your presentation?

55. Very important graph
Region 1 Region 2
100
75
50
25
0
2007 2008 2009 2010
Including a 2D chart! Scientific data should never be displayed in 3D, unless you have 3D
glasses to see it. Portraying a 3D image on a 2D surface makes it very hard to accurately
compare data series. This can be particularly offensive when using 3D pie charts. NO MORE
3D GRAPHS IN SCIENCE!

56. #16

57. Very important figure
How can we make this graph potentially unusable?

58. Very important figure
Let’s change the data series to be barely distinguishable. Don’t ever use colors which are very
similar. They make look very different on your computer screen, but projectors can
sometimes display colors very differently.

59. #17

60. The Korf Lab
Established in 2004
Twelve full-time members.
21 publications
Many diverse research projects.
Three things wrong with this slide. The bullet points are in several different font sizes, the
second bullet point starts with a space character, and two of the bullet points end in a period.
BE CONSISTENT!

61. The Korf Lab
Established in 2004
Twelve full-time members
21 publications
Many diverse research projects
Ah, we can breathe again!

62. #18

63. What makes Keith very
angry?
Many things can anger
him
You should be aware of
this
Easy to avoid this
problem!
Nothing upsets me more than slides like this. Leaving all of those single words wrapping
around to separate lines makes this slide very unbalanced and ugly.

64. What makes Keith very angry?
Many things can anger him
You should be aware of this
Easy to avoid this problem!
Now, I’ve simply reduced the title font a little and resized the bullet point text box. Now it
looks calmer and more serene (despite the imminent death-by-Mummy-attack)

65. #19

66. Important table
Person C00lness Force Perl H-index
skills skills
Ian 6.023 4.001 135.423 44.0
Nigel 11.11 2.0045 -2.456 0.0
Yoda 86.321 2,234.5 28.242 52.0
Bieber -0.132 0.00001 -200.00 0.00
Tables with too many cells are not going to make for great reading by the audience. Are they
going to be expected to look at every value? Do we need to show them all of those decimal
places, or could it be simplified? Can we make the header row stand out a little bit?

67. Important table
Person Coolness Force skills Perl skills H-index
Ian 6 4 135 44
Nigel 11 2 -2 0
Yoda 86 2,234 28 52
Bieber 0 0 -200 0
Et voila! All very simple changes, and now the table is much more readable (well, before the
changes it was unreadable). Personally, I try to avoid anything more than a 5x5 table, and
even then I will ensure I patiently explain the key points from it.

68. #20

69. Result from paper
Here is a figure that I extracted from a paper. I only want you to look at panel C, so I
highlighted it in red. Don’t look at anything else!

70. Result from paper
Better now? If you only want to show one thing, then remove everything else. Also note that
there is no need to see the ‘C’ from the panel label, so I drew a white rectangle over it to hide
it.

71. #19

72. Methylation patterns in rice introns
Another complex figure grabbed from a paper, which in turn has been grabbed from an
online database. Look at all those tiny fonts, and hard-to-read coordinates.

73. Methylation patterns in rice introns
12,956,000 12,967,000
chr3 Gene Os03g22570
Now I’ve tried clearing things up a little bit. I’ve added my own label to the x-axis of this
figure. You can do the same for many graphs that you show where the original fonts are too
small or unclear. I could — and perhaps should — also add my own legend to this figure to
better explain the different colored series.

74. #20

75. Growth of GenBank
Continues to grow
exponentially
Shows no sign of
slowing
Hundreds of billions of
bases
Sequencing has become
cheaper and faster Data from GenBank 2000–2005
There are so many things that are wrong with this slide. A 3D chart with old data, which has a
title that is almost reproduced by the slide title. The bullet points do very little other than
explain the data that should be obvious from the graph itself.

76. Growth of GenBank
number of number of
base pairs sequences
A different graph makes things simpler and clearer. I added my own legend, but even that
could probably go. Let the data speak for itself!

77. #21

78. Intron length vs position
You can calculate the length of introns at different positions in a
gene
There is a notable pattern of different lengths at different intron
positions
First introns in particular are significantly longer than others
Downstream introns tend to have similar lengths and are shorter
Bradnam & Korf 2008: “Longer first introns are a general property
of eukaryotic gene structure” PLoS ONE
Out of 500 species surveyed, 30 out of 36 species that had
sufficient data exhibited longer first introns
Too many bullet points, and too many bullet points which don’t add to the story and just
makes things needlessly complex.

79. Intron length vs position
First introns tend to be longer
Bradnam & Korf 2008: “Longer first introns are a general
property of eukaryotic gene structure” PLoS ONE
30 out of 36 species had significantly longer first introns
Now, it is just focused on the salient points. Much easier for people to digest. As a general
rule I try to avoid using more than 4–5 bullet points on a slide (and I try to avoid bullet point
slides altogether).

80. #22

81. I like cheese
Which cheeses do I like?
Havarti
Brie
Shaft’s Blue
a local cheese from California!
Roquefort
This slide starts off with a top-level bullet point and immediately moves to a 2nd-level bullet
point. Do we return to the top level? No. In this case the first bullet point might as well be the
slide title.

82. Which cheeses do I like?
Havarti
Brie
Shaft’s Blue (from CA!)
Roquefort
Simpler and cleaner, with no loss of information.

83. #23

84. Assemblathon 2
Who will be the winner?
There is so much terrible clip-art in the world. It will only ever make your presentation look
worse.

85. Who will win Assemblathon 2
http://flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/6323440907/
If you need an image, search Flickr Creative Commons for a stronger, more stirring, visual.

86. #24

87. Just look at the difference!
Coffee Water Milk
100%
Stella’s liquid consumption
All numerical data should be shown graphically, right?

88. Just look at the difference!
Liters consumed
Liquid
per year
Coffee 50,245
Water 76
Milk 25
Stella’s liquid consumption
Well sometimes, the raw numbers tell a better story. When you are comparing numbers which
are very different, a graph will never really capture the scale of the difference (unless you do
some sort of log-transformation).

89. #25

90. Background research
Keith’s breakthrough paper was in 1999
A collaboration with Ken ‘yeast genome’ Wolfe
G+C Content Variation Along and Among
Saccharomyces cerevisiae Chromosomes. 1999,
Mol. Biol. Evol.
There is nothing really wrong with this slide. But could there be a way to improve it up by
adding an image that made things more interesting without introducing any clutter?

91. Background research
My first paper
Published in
Mol. Biol. Evol, 1999
It doesn’t take much to think of ways of including simple visuals in your presentation that
actually add to the content. In this case I, hopefully, reinforce that this is a real paper that
actually existed. It also allows me to simplify the bullet points on the screen. I sometimes do
a similar thing with screen-grabs of websites, to show databases that I used.

92. Summary

93. There are many easy things that you can do
to greatly improve your slides.
All of the tweaks on the preceding 25 sets of slides took only seconds to apply in most cases.

94. 5 things to remember
Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.
Hope you found this presentation useful!

95. 5 things to remember
i. We are visual creatures...use images
Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.
Hope you found this presentation useful!

96. 5 things to remember
i. We are visual creatures...use images
ii. Use good images. Look at Flickr Creative Commons
Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.
Hope you found this presentation useful!

97. 5 things to remember
i. We are visual creatures...use images
ii. Use good images. Look at Flickr Creative Commons
iii. Less is often more
Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.
Hope you found this presentation useful!

98. 5 things to remember
i. We are visual creatures...use images
ii. Use good images. Look at Flickr Creative Commons
iii. Less is often more
iv. People remember good presentations
Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.
Hope you found this presentation useful!

99. 5 things to remember
i. We are visual creatures...use images
ii. Use good images. Look at Flickr Creative Commons
iii. Less is often more
iv. People remember good presentations
v. Don’t leave slides to the last minute (it will show!)
Lots of little changes can add up to having a bigger overall effect.
Hope you found this presentation useful!