Style

The style of the talk should be chosen such that it supports the message, the occasion and your personality. The guiding rule should always be that the chosen style should not make the slides hard to read or distract the attention of the audience from the message. For example having an animation on the slide which runs all the time will most certainly catch the eye of the audience, because our eyes are programmed to look at moving objects. But this will make it impossible for the listener to follow your discussion on the rest of your slide while this animation is running. You can have different styles for different occasions. Figure 5.1 shows an example of a slide style for a working group meeting and in Fig. 5.2 for an invited seminar talk on the same topic. Style features which are important are the font style, the slide background and border, colours, plots, tables, pictures and animation. We will cover each of these in the sections below. The choice of the font should be a conscious decision and should not be just guided by your aesthetic feelings or the system default. There are several choices to be made under the font banner, and all are important. • Style: Serif or Sans Serif, • Appearance: normal, bold, italic, underlined or combined, • Size: small (8 pt), medium (12 pt), large (16 pt), huge (20 pt), vast (24 pt), • Colour: foreground (text) and background. Colour theory is quite complex, and beyond the scope of this book. However, a few simple ideas should help avoid most problems. The colour of the font and the colour of the background need to be considered together; it is better to choose colours that are readily distinguishable, with high contrast. A yellow (black) text on a white (dark) background is nearly invisible. Remember that your presentation may be printed on a black and white printer and colour-coded information may be lost if there is low contrast, and that between 5% and 8% of males and less than 1% of females are colour blind.