The Non-Verbals
Presentations and public speaking are very much about what you communicate to your audience verbally. The content matters, the story matters, your delivery, whether online or face to face matters. But, giving presentations and public speaking are also about design and non-verbals: the visuals, what we see.
In this section, we cover a number of topics points that have to do with design, and tools that help you to think about the design of your presentations.
Poster Design
Depending on which discipline you’re in, posters are a common way to present your research results at large conferences. Poster designs can take make different shapes and forms and can also be presented differently, depending on the organisation and platform. As such, reading the guidelines provided by the conference is essential. In some cases, templates might have been provided. If there are no templates, you can always ask your colleagues in your department if they have an example poster or template which they always use.
If you want to learn more about good poster design and the general principles behind good poster design, we recommend the following guideline:
NYU poster design guideline
Ian Kpachavi Carleton College Psychology Department how to design a poster guideline
Prezi design
Prezi is a great alternative for designing presentations. The problem, as will many alternative tools, is that you might need to pay for a plan to make it worth all the extra efforts, and it requires some learning. However, the basic version of Prezi offers some great solutions if you need to make and share a presentation online.
There are some great tutorials online which can help you get started designing Prezi presentations, and as always, we generally challenge you to think outside the common toolbox and explore alternatives.
Slide Design + Tools (such as Biorender)
- Generally, there are certain tips and tricks you can follow when designing your presentations. Below are we present some of these tips and tricks, but we leave it to you to decide how and why and whether you will implement them for your own presentation. These tips and tricks are not general guiding principles for how it should be done, but general guidelines on what else you can do, instead of the common frameworks we tend to see and use.
- Many of us will be lured into the trap of MS PowerPoint, and don’t get us wrong, MS PowerPoint is a powerful application that can help you design wonderful presentations, but there are other programs and tools you can use to design great presentations. We will not dive too much into these here, but simply provide some links to these tools for you to explore by yourself.
- First, what we would like to provide you is to take into consideration some of these general tips you can follow to avoid slides that may be heavy on text. Instead, focus on images, figures, flowcharts, timelines, etc. However, do not only focus on this. You need to find a balance. Another aspect you have to focus on is how your slides enhance your story and not the other way around. Develop your story first, and use your slides to provide input to strengthen that story with images, words, and colours. Without you, the slides themselves will not convey a story — if they did, it might as well be an article. Thus, as you control the story, you also control the outline and the sequence of ideas contained in your slides.
- Balance
- Balance in your presentation is achieved visually through:
- Your use of icons and images. Make sure you choose one type of visualisation in your slides. As much as possible, do not mix too many different types of visual input, such as icons, text, graphs, and pictures, and colours. Here are some examples of slides that are well balanced.
- Balance is also created when you use bullet points, but again, rich text-heavy bullet points might throw off the needs of your audience.
- Using Icons and Illustrations to strengthen your story:
- You can build beautiful slides with icons and make them look sleek and professional. Here are some suggestions:
- The latest version of PowerPoint has a great library of Icons. In PowerPoint go to Insert>Icons
- Google (of course) is a treasure trove for icons. The best way to find them though is to use the following keyword: “name of image” followed by vector. https://lmgtfy.app/?q=Presentation+Vector&t=i
- Other great sources:
- You can build beautiful slides with icons and make them look sleek and professional. Here are some suggestions:
- Balance and colours
- When creating balance, remember also that you can choose to create a dark background and lighter images. Again, there are no rules which state that you should only operate with the standard colour white as your background.
- We suggest you experiment using colours. Colours convey emotions, associations with specific topics (e.g. Green and Nature; )
- Balance in your presentation is achieved visually through:
- Balance
In addition some additional guidelines provided David JP Phillips at TEDxStockholmSalon
Biorender for the Natural Sciences
Many students in the natural and medical sciences have to rely on graphics. Biorender is a tool that for many is the to-go place for graphic representations. Again, we recommend you talk to your colleagues in the department or fellow PhD students and ask them which tools they use.
Below we share the slides of one of our ComSci Team members, Larissa Maciel, who generally supports other PhD students on how to use the tool. In addition, below are some really useful video introductions to the tool, and we suggest you give the tool a try and report back to us with questions and comments.
Non-verbal communication
Jason Mario Dydynsky, who has been a long-standing ComSci team member, has shared his tips and tricks how to work with your non-verbal communication:
Plus, if you’re looking to slowly tease out your fear of public speaking, try some of these techniques:
