Some ideas for scientific presentations
I like reading Garr Reynolds Prezentation Zen blog, so when he wrote a book about giving presentations I bought a copy. "So what?" you say "PhD students are paid so much money, I'm sure they spend their cash on all sorts of frivolous things." That's true, but I found Garr's book a great read and would highly recommend taking an evening to browse it's contents, perhaps accompanied with a bottle of Bollinger '64 and some freshly imported sushi del chianti.
I recently had to give a presentation on my research the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2008 in Barcelona. Having been recently read Garr's book at the time, I'm going to highlight some of his ideas that were useful, as well as some that came from practising my presentation.
Plan, Plan, Plan
This is a great tip and really helped in creating my presentation. Usually I just jump right in, and start making slides in Keynote/Powerpoint, however planning the presentation before hand, both sketching the main theme, as well planning individual slides with post-it notes made creating the presentation much, much easier. I will explicitly recommend the use of post-it notes for planning a presentation, as it's easier to rearrange, create, and delete post-its than it is to do the same with slides in Keynote.
Getting scientific images
One thing I find hard when generating a presentation, is to find images to represent the point I'm trying to get across. For example, it's not the easiest thing to find a high quality image of transcription. The best place I found for getting images for free is stock exchange, which has loads of high quality images, which are easy to get at. Scientific images, however, are less easy to come across. The problem is that they a lot of them are from scientific papers, so need to be open access for you to use, or on the other hand they just aren't of good enough quality to be blown up to six feet on a project screen. Pierre did recommend one great place for scientific images, which is wiki commons, has some good stuff, check out this for an example enzyme image search.
In many cases though, I'm not able to find the right image that I'm after, and so sometimes I'll take a few attempts at drawing the image on a piece of paper, and scan it in. Programs like Illustrator, and the free equivalent Inkscape allow you to convert the drawing to a vector image. Using the simplify command will also remove the hand drawing kinks to make the drawing more rounded and smooth. Below is some sketches of yeast cells, followed by the finalised vector version I used in my presentation.
Here's another example where I wanted to create a much simplified version of glycolysis/TCA cycle. The hand drawn scan is on the right, and the vectorised is on the left.
Rule of thirds
I'd never heard of this before, but breaking a slide into 9 equally sized boxes, and organising the content of this slide according to these lines makes the slide more visually appealling.
Using metaphor
Scientific presentations can sometimes be difficult to follow if your not familiar with the subject of the talk. Furthermore if I'm at a conference, and I've been sat through an afternoon's worth of talks, my attention span starts to decrease rapidly. One thing I tried when giving a talk was to try and link current events into my talk to try and focus the audience's attention on some key points, as well as lighten the tone. In the below slide I tried to relate metabolic cost and fitness to a similar balance football clubs look for when buying players. I
