workshop 3: design, delivery and display

HI, ALL SCICOMMERS!

If you were unable to attend our face-to-face workshop at the Royal Society of Victoria, fear not—this is your go-to page for the summary of the workshop flow, presentations, and fun science communication activities that took place.

Visual design

Visual design is a great way to enhance your speech. It’s a nice way to emphasize and summarize your explanations visually, whilst keeping your audience engaged.

I think we’ve all momentarily malfunctioned when we see paragraphs slapped onto a blank slide. Or a low resolution image unceremoniously stretched on a screen. Or this unholy mess…

Good design often establishes a sense of hierarchy. This is when the colour, the scale, or the shape of an element on your slide influences whether it is the first or last thing you see. Our mind unconsciously orders which is the most important to the least to make sense of the information overload and keep us from feeling overwhelmed. Normally the most eye-catching elements - the more vividly coloured or the larger the object - are what our brain thinks is most important. This is why the images or the title are often seen before the supporting text.

The slide below aims to supplement the speech rather than draw attention away from it. I think it highlights the key points of photosynthesis clearly and doesn’t repeat things.

5/5/5 rule

Sticking to the 5/5/5 rule can further simplify your presentations. Try having a maximum of:

5 words per line of text.
5 words per line of text.
5 text-heavy slides in a row.

Software

Here are some examples of software you can use to create your presentation.

Microsoft PowerPoint
Canva
Prezi
Raster-based programs (like Photoshop): can manipulate the pixels of an image. Be vary when you want to blow up your graphic to the size of a billboard when the original design was for a phone screen as these graphics will be very blurry and noisy!
Vector-based programs (like Illustrator): use vectors to create an image. These programs are great as they retain the resolution of the graphic no matter the size of the final product.

Tools:

Adding interactive features can further help your audience relate or engage with your presentation.

Word Clouds
Polls
Videos

Some free resources:

Royalty-free images: Everypixel or Unsplash
Typeface libraries: Google fonts (do try to use less than two typefaces otherwise your presentation may be too messy! - you can get away with this by italicising, bolding, CAPITALISING words for example)
Icons: noun project
Colour Palettes: Coolers.

GUEST SPEAKER - Jack O’Connor

Jack (he/they) is a vertebrate palaeontology honours researcher from the Evans EvoMorph Lab & the BSc. Advanced Global Challenges (Honours) at Monash University, as well as the previous Head of Let’s Torque for 2021. The following outlines the guest speaker section presented by Jack.

PowerPoint is an extremely powerful, flexible, user-friendly, and affordable tool. It is often underutilised, and thus underappreciated, by those who cross the path of this program, but with a little effort and insight into some tips and tricks, a great deal of creative power can emerge.

Examples of Jack’s Previous PowerPoint Art

(see @jackocdesign on Instagram)

Many animals, including a Glass Octopus for the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and a Deinocheirus (Spoonbill colouration) for Prehistoric Planet;
Great Barrier Reef, high Mountain Ecosystem etc. infographics;
Advocacy & Climate Action Infographics (Invasion Day etc.);
PalaeoArt (redescription of Zygomaturus trilobus).

Honours Palaeo Work as an Example of Powerpoint Structure

Utilising alliteration, consistent colouration, and Zygomaturus humerus and skull replacements in the title to cover multiple engagements at once;
Recreating logos of partner organisations for branding on every slide;
Animations allow the eye to blink and move, the Eucalyptus leaves to sway in the wind, and the clouds in the background to move;
Importance of having mystique in the first slide for a species description.

Morph Transition, Sign-Posting & 3D Modelling

When animations can’t get the job done, the ‘Morph Transition’ allows great numbers of groups of shapes to move into exact positions across a slide barrier. Here we can see a Zygomaturus skeleton, which has been made as individual groups for each bone, such that it can ‘build’ and ‘unbuild’ themselves across a transition.

It is also important to note the skeleton graphic in the lower left-hand corner, which acts as a sign-posting tool such that when the slide next zooms into specific sections of the skeleton for discussion, the graphic can change to show which section is being viewed. This allows for greater audience comprehension throughout.

When you want to take your PowerPoint to the next level by including 3D modelling elements, my recommendation is to use the free program ‘Blender’ to build, sculpt, and texture a model you would like to show, and then to either render an animation from Blender itself, or import it into the program ‘SketchFab’ which is an incredibly user-friendly way of allowing an audience to manipulate an annotated 3D model.

The Basics with Design.

Fonts:

When it comes to choosing fonts as eye-catching and intriguing fancy curly fonts or black metal scribbles is tempting, you want to make sure that your audience can easily read the text you are showing on screen. Typically Sans-serif fonts work best for presentations especially considering those who may not be familiar with English characters or have trouble recognizing certain shapes.

When in double, the il1 test is your best bet. Try looking at your screen from a distance to make sure you can differentiate between these characters.

Size:

Most experts would say that font size 24 is the smallest font you should ever use during a presentation. The bigger the room you are presenting too, the bigger the font should be to make sure that even the person sitting at the very back of the room can see.

Colour:

When choosing colours for your presentation, making sure you can read text is important. Using complementary colours make your fonts pop and stand out more, however using similar colours like a grouping of warm or cool colours can do well with your branding and atmosphere of your presentation.

The best way to test if your colours are contracting enough is what a lot of graphic design and artists use, which is the desaturation test. Even colours with different hues can come across as garish and harsh on the eyes as they may all be the same on the greyscale.

Content:

You want to avoid overloading your slides with information as it can be distracting to your audience. There are three simple rules to remember when it comes to the amount of content in your presentation.

The fewer the better. Long paragraphs can be distracting to the audience.
Enough to jog your memory. Your audience is ultimately listening to you speak, but sometimes you need a bit of assistance as to what you are saying.
Make it impactful! Ultimately, if you have words on your slides, you want your audience to draw their attention to them, so make sure that the words that are on there are impactful and critical to your presentation.

Using data

As we are all STEM students here, at some point in our careers we will be displaying data to non-experts to communicate our research findings to them. To a lay person, grey boxes or a paragraph of statistics can be difficult to understand. So, which type of graph do you use? Bar, line, pictogram?

There are three things to remember when it comes to choosing your graphic:

Is your data quantitative or qualitative?
Is your data continuous or discrete?
Is your data relevant?

If there is a massive amount of data in your findings but your audience is only interested in one particular part, then it is better to keep their focus on the relevant data then muddying up your presentation.

Why do I hate pie graphs so much?

A lot of people still use pie graphs to display data despite how unhelpful they are.

They’re incredibly inaccessible, telling the difference between the sides of the slices is very difficult to see without having percentages written directly on every slice or within the key.
They don’t show change well. Having multiple pie charts next to each other to compare is not only messy, but is also assuming that the number of the data points is the same for each time new data is created.
It is separated into 360 degrees. This can make your graph look very inaccurate if your data is not divisible by 360, or can be easily arranged as such.

Just… Don’t use them.

Design Psychology

We might just take some moments to analyse just why and how design choices are so important for grabbing audience’s attention. You can see two pictures in front of you. I want you to do is name one Bouba, and the other one Kiki.

This was an experiment conducted by Wolfgang Kohler the Bouba/Kiki experiment originated in 1929 when Wolfgang Köhler used the words ‘maluma’ and ‘takete’ to examine the link between the senses. The aim of this experiment was to examine whether participants associated ‘maluma’ with a round shape and ‘takete’ with a spiky shape.

Many of us are visual learners, who memorise content more effectively if they are image-based. Therefore, presenters tend to use infographics to present data in a more comprehensive way. Reading a whole PowerPoint slide with lots of lines can be a slow, lose audience engagement activity, and more time-consuming than just looking at a chart or visual art.

Photographs, while useful for conveying contextual information, can also evoke strong emotional reactions that motivate behaviour. When communicating complex information, data visualizations, like maps, charts, and graphs, can present large sets of data in more meaningful and understandable ways. They allow for audiences to observe trends and patterns easily, reducing the time needed to process the information and increase audience engagement.

One more thing to take into consideration is selecting the right type of visualization for the data, recognizing that some types may be less appropriate (ie. Pie charts) and can lead to your audience becoming confused. Just like you saw with our example above, careful which one you name Bouba and which one you name Kiki.

Almost done!

At this point, we’ve covered how to use different tools like PowerPoint to create your slides, how to best convey your data through charts and graphs and taken the opportunity to practice your design skills. So, at this point there’s only one question left to answer… where do I actually start?

Cue scaling design, to the rescue!

Scaling design is a means of organising how you will create your presentation – starting with the basic things, like jotting down all your info, and progressing towards less necessary additions. This helps keep track of what still needs to be done, and helps you manage your time effectively; after all, if you run out of time to make your presentation, it’s important that it has all of its slides!

While there are different ways to implement scaling design, this six-step model covers all the broad strokes you need to not only finish your presentation, but take it above and beyond!

1. Content

To begin your presentation, make sure that everything you want to talk about is included on your slides. It doesn’t matter if it looks ugly (in fact, it probably will), but it’s important that you know from the get-go everything that you need to discuss. Try creating a list of bullet points on each slide containing short trigger phrases: if you’re talking about the benefits of using cue cards, for example, try:

Helps you remember
Quick to create
Easy to carry

The bulk of your information should be in what you say, not what you show on-screen, but using these small indicators can help your audience remember the key details.

2. Visuals

Now, it’s time to spruce up your slides! The design tips discussed earlier should give you some good ground to work from, but it’s also important to make your slides stand out. The best thing your presentation can be is memorable, and the best way to do that is with a custom theme!

While creating a custom theme is time-consuming, this added layer of uniqueness is crucial to helping your idea stick. Another bonus with the custom theme is that you can tailor it better to your presentation. For instance, the colour blue is often associated with the tech industry, so if your STEM idea is tech-adjacent, then using a blue-tinted colour scheme is the way to go!

That being said, a default theme from PowerPoint or Google Slides will get the job done, and if you don’t have time to enhance your theme further, then using one is better than nothing.

This is also your chance to turn your bullet points into something more engaging. Try replacing one of your points with an image conveying the same idea! Sites like unsplash.net provide a great resource for high-quality, free-to-use images, but being able to design graphics using Adobe Illustrator or similar programs is also encouraged.

3. Interaction

Now it’s time to start branching outside the slides. Consider asking the audience questions every now and then. The benefits are two-fold: they keep the audience engaged, and they help reinforce existing knowledge by allowing you to clarify anything they may have missed. It’s important to consider this earlier on, since your slides will need to be relevant to the questions you ask.

Also, while it may be tempting to ask misleading/trick questions, be careful! Trick questions can oftentimes dissuade people from answering, since they don’t want to embarrass themselves. It’s important to create an atmosphere where it’s acceptable to make mistakes, since this causes people to stop fixating on being wrong and focus on learning.

4. Movement

Now that you’ve created your slides, it’s time to tie them all together! Using the animations and transitions available in tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides and Prezi can help make your slides feel more connected, and thus make your presentation more cohesive.

This also helps spread out the information in your presentation: if you want to talk about two topics that are tangentially related, try having some of the points filter in on the same slide, so that the audience isn’t overwhelmed with information when you first present that slide.

5. Signposting

Signposting refers to including indicators that inform your audience about where you are in the presentation. Think of them like chapter numbers for your presentation: they help tell the audience when you move on to a wildly different topic. There are many ways to do this – having a tracker on the bottom or a number in the corner, as basic examples – but any kind of signposting aids your audience in keeping track of information, similar to the way that adding movement does.

6. External Pizzazz

Alright, now your presentation’s done! So what’s this part for, you ask? Well, instead of thinking about how you present your presentation, think about how you present yourself. Are you going to wear business casual, a lab coat, or something else? Will you move around the stage a lot to build up energy, or stay in one place to take the focus away from yourself? Are there any props you could use to enhance your explanations or as setups for jokes?

Regardless of your answers, it’s important to think about how you look to your audience. While it may be tempting to establish authority, people are often more open-minded when they feel as if they can relate to someone, so don’t be afraid to make yourself look silly from time to time!

With these steps, you can help organise your presentation to fit within your time constraints, and make it as cohesive as possible!

Activities to try at home!

Graphing Data:

Find some data from your favourite scientific study and try graphing it in different ways. Play around with programs such as excel or try hand drawing them.
After playing around with different stylings, ask a friend or family member for feedback, which one was more eye catching to them and which was one the easiest to understand.

Can’t find any data to practice with? Try our list here.