If you missed my webinar, here’s a quick summary of what I covered.

If you are putting together a poster or presentation, start off by thinking of some of the great presentations you’ve seen. What’s made them great? On the other hand, recall any talks that you have heard that have been terrible. What’s made them bad? Once you consider both ends of the spectrum, I think you will agree that there are five things that make or break a presentation:

1. Cohesive content
2. Easy-to-follow organization
3. Plenty of figures and visuals
4. Clear and succinct titles
5. Aesthetics

Let’s break each of these points down:

(1) Cohesive content

A cohesive presentation has a story. It is rarely a chronological description of a project or theme, and so the first (often forgotten) step in putting a presentation is to dissect everything you want to talk about and pull out a single thread that connects what you have done into a logical and interesting story.

You also want to think about what a novice can take away from your talk – i.e., what is the eye-catching finding?

And on the other hand, what can the expert take away from your talk – i.e., what is new to the field?

I am not saying that each presentation has to have a revolutionary idea, but rather that there should be a clear message that anyone that listens can take away from your talk.

(2) Easy-to-follow organization

For presentations: use overview slides and progress bars. These serves a few purposes:

• to give the audience a guide for where you are in the talk
• to give you a point of reference for adjusting the speed of your talk
• helps outline the store you want to convey
• conveys the key points you want to make if your talk

For posters: use headers, titles, and/or arrows. Because posters are relatively “free-form”, providing directions can help improve the readability of your poster. Typically, you should use the reading direction typical to the language (e.g., for English – left to right, top to bottom).

Organization is on the presenter. If your organization is too confusing, your audience will simply zone out of your talk or walk past your poster.

Clear organization allows the audience to focus on the content.

(3) Figures and visuals

By using figures and visuals, you cater to multiple learning styles and help the audience grasp your point more quickly. Visuals can be images, graphs, cartoons, or even text-based organizational charts.

The trickiest aspect of using visuals is that they h must be consistent throughout your presentation. So, if you use figures from different papers, make sure to adjust the color scheme and labeling style so the audience can follow along with your talk without having to re-analyze every image you show.

Figures and visuals provide a common starting point for building ideas.

(4) Clear and succinct titles

Titles should be short and sweet while conveying the key point of your slide or section. Importantly, you should take advantage of spaces and punctuations to make your point.

For example, consider the following title:

“Microscopy Analyses of Mold Show Growth
Patterns Change with Temperature”

Growth and growth patterns are quite different, so the spacing above might be quite confusing to someone encountering the topic for the first time. Instead, you could simply change the spacing as follows,

“Microscopy Analyses of Mold Show Growth Patterns
Change with Temperature”

This makes the point much easier to digest and gives a clear idea of what was studied, how it was studied, and what the results were. Depending on what the focus of the slide/section was, you could also further edit your title as follows,

“Mold Growth Patterns
Change with Temperature”

which gets us back to our main point – short and sweet!

(5) Aesthetic considerations

First, think about fonts and font sizes. Typically, easy to read fonts are best (Arial, Calibri, Tahoma, etc.) with relatively large sizes (> 18 for presentations and > 20 for posters). For posters, you should ensure that the key points (headings) are readable at least 2 ft away. You can also use boding, underlines, and either in combinations with a different color to emphasize your points.

Colors in general are important to the aesthetics and cohesiveness of talks. Generally, using a fixed color scheme helps to maintain flow (if you look up complementary colors for presentations on your favorite search engine, you will find lots of suggestions for palettes!). Some obvious ones to avoid are yellows on light backgrounds and blues and greens on dark backgrounds. Also, when possible, try to avoid using reds and greens together and instead use a different color scheme or try shading!

Use white space to your advantage! Take a look at the 2 images below. You will immediately notice the purple box in the middle because they are surrounded by “white space”. Utilizing empty space around your key figure or key points can also help emphasize your content.

It is all about symmetry and catching people’s eye!

Once you’ve considered all of these points, the only thing left to do will be to put together your speech. Whether you write it all out like I do, or put together a list of the key ideas you want to talk about, all of the time you spent to polish your poster/presentation will no doubt help you give a wonderful talk.

Want more details on putting a good presentation together? Check out this article.

Want to know how to prepare your speech? We’ll have to save that for another article coming soon!