Improve Your Technical Slides | Ruby on Rails for Newbies

Improve Your Technical Slides 14 comments

posted Thursday, August 28, 2008 by topfunky

I’ve had to rely at times on silence and on talking quick / Defending myself with nothing but my walking stick. —Buck65

Here are nine easy tips that will help you communicate better at your next conference.

Figure A Can you read me now?

Dan Grigsby’s presentation at RubyFringe was an intentional example of this. All the titles were at the top, with humorous stock photos below.

Keep it in the top third, if possible.

Figure B Takahashi-san frowns on your tiny fonts

Giles Bowkett is such an entertaining speaker that people once skipped the first 20 minutes of lunch to hear the remainder of his presentation at RubyFringe (which involved more than 400 slides).

He also used only the typefaces included with Mac OS X, including Futura Condensed Medium and Condensed ExtraBold, which work really well in bright colors on black. So even if you don’t choose to buy a single typeface, you can assemble a great-looking presentation.

Giles Bowkett Videos – Start 5 minutes in to see the slides.

Figure C Working well and looking good

It’s easy with either:

Copy as RTF – A TextMate plugin. You can paste the syntax-highlighted text and even edit it afterward in Keynote.

pygments – A command-line syntax highlighter written in Python. It’s used at GitHub to emit HTML but can also emit RTF from any source file. The resulting rich text can be pasted into Keynote.

pygmentize -f rtf -o out.rtf code.rb

Figure D Stay on target

Choosing just the right transition can soak up a lot of time and adds absolutely nothing to the content that people remember afterward.

Dan Grigsby also noted that transitions and multi-step builds make it difficult to go back and forth in the presentation since you have to wait for the transition to finish. Unless…

Figure E An unforced fumble while trying to backtrack

Useful Keynote shortcuts (while the presentation is playing).

Key	Description
/	Show a list of keyboard shortcuts.
H	Pause the presentation and go to the last used application (useful for demos). Command-tab back to Keynote to resume the presentation.
= or -	Show a thumbnail menu that can be used to jump forward or backward to a specific slide. Use the arrow keys to select and the enter key to jump.
B	Pause and show a black screen.

Figure F The conference wifi WILL fail when you need it most

I love live coding but often it goes awry, creating an awkward situation for both the presenter and the audience.

Give yourself some insurance and either record a short screencast that you can narrate during the presentation, or take screenshots that you can refer to.

Extra Credit!

Figure G Is grey a color?

If you’re speaking at a conference, you’re probably doing it to promote yourself, your projects, or your business. Make it stick in people’s minds by distinguishing yourself with a color scheme and a typeface that communicate the attitude you want to be remembered for.

Choose a color scheme and use it for all your presentations. Ideally, it would be the color scheme of your company or personal blog. If you’ve paid for a corporate identity, use it!

Resources

Color Burn Widget – A Mac OS X dashboard widget with a new color scheme every day.
ColourLovers.com – Tons of color combinations for every attitude.

Figure H An easy way to stand out

Again, buy a typeface and use it on your blog and in your presentations.

They’re not as expensive as you might think! You can get a single font for $20.

Here are some nice condensed ones as mentioned above:

Or try these shops:

Figure I Free as in not chained to the spacebar

I saved my favorite for the end…

A presentation remote gives you the freedom to step away from the lectern and talk directly to the audience. The remote that comes with Mac laptops doesn’t count! It only works if you have a direct line of sight to the infrared receiver on the front edge of the laptop.

A radio frequency transmitter works much better. The Kensington Presentation Remote can be bought for about $40. It works out of the box without the need to install any drivers, and it’s less distracting than phone-based options.

See you in Berlin!

I’ll be in Berlin at RailsConf starting this Sunday. Find me and get a free PeepCode t-shirt!

14 comments

Leave a response

josh susser

All good points, and I usually follow most of these myself (but you have to know when you break the rules too).

I agree syntax highlighting makes code easier to read, but I’ll usually skip the syntax highlighting in favor of using color to call attention to important features in the code. But after the “invisible color code leads to tech as ghost story” catastrophe with my slides at RailsConf I probably won’t do that again.

Remember that what looks good on your monitor probably will look quite different when projected in an auditorium. So if at all possible, do a tech run-through in the environment where you’ll be speaking, using the same projector and lighting conditions, sound system, laser pointer, etc. If you don’t do that, you’ll often be surprised – especially if it’s your first time speaking to a large audience.
Luke Francl

Great advice, Geoffrey.

I also recommend people read Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (also a chapter in Beautiful Evidence) and Presentation Zen for some powerful ideas and real-world examples of how to make your presentations better.
Christian Lupp

As always … great points on optimizing presentations! Thanks Geoffrey for making the point! See you in Berlin next week!

BTW … Bratwurst-on-Rails is on Monday evening … Conference starts on Tuesday ;-)
Jonathan Conway

Excellent tips Geoffrey. Great timing too coz I still need to sit down and write my talk for next week.
John Ivanoff

Thanks. There’s been a lot of talk about bad presentations. There’s a new book called “slide:ology” written by Nancy Duarte. Jon Gordon’s “Future Tense” just did a podcast with Nancy “We stink at PowerPoint, and it’s our own fault”. Also the site “Presentation Zen” is a good site.
bryanl

word!

and if you want to cheat on a remote, get a wireless bluetooth mouse. it can at the minimum do backwards and forwards in keynote.
Sebastian

Nice fotos are for me the most important thing.
Jon Dahl

Great tips.

For code slides, I tend to do this from TextMate:

1. Bundles > TextMate > Create HTML From Document

2. Preview HTML

3. Copy & paste into Textmate

This works fine, and probably does the same thing as Dr. Nic’s “Copy as RTF” bundle (which I haven’t tried.)

But my question: what colors work well and work poorly on a projector? At RailsConf this year, it became clear that red/orange text on a black background doesn’t show up well on a projector. Anyone have an opinion of the best TextMate color scheme for presentation purposes??
Sigurdur Armannsson

Nice tips. I wish that hopeless presentators come here in herds to read it.

I do my presentations in OmniOutliner, that is the text part. When finished OmniOutliner allows to save as .key . So, when you double-click the file it opens in Keynote. You choose your theme and everything is ready with headers and bullits. Only thing left to add mimimalistic transitions, time the presentaions and practise.
Robert Lischke

Another way to “cheat” with the remote is to use this plugin for OpenOffice.org/Impress:

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/moooic

It essentially enables you to control the slides with your bluetooth enabled phone.
Ryan Mulligan

How do you use a font you buy on your blog? Won’t only people who have your font see it?
Jarkko Laine
@Ryan

You have basically three options, none of which is flawless:
- Create images of the pieces where you want to use a special font that is probably not found on the readers machine. You can use some of the image replacement techniques if you want to.
- Use sIFR. Flash needed, but works even in dynamic settings, unlike the method above.
- Use the @font-face property to embed fonts. Unfortunately, not many fonts are licensed so that you’re allowed to embed them into web pages. Some pretty cool ones are, though. @font-face works currently in Safari 3.1 (and IE but not with TrueType/OpenType fonts), but it’s planned for Firefox 3.1 and Opera 10. The future is closer than you might think.
Dr Nic

@Jon Dahl – to give credit appropriately, the Copy to RTF bundle was created entirely by Max Muermann. I’m hosting it on github because Max’s blog died and with it went the link to his copy of the bundle. Max also went awol for awhile, so I pushed the code without his permission (at the time). I think he’s given me his blessing since then.
Hendy Irawan

I just bought a Okion Ottawa presenter for about USD 55, which is really good and functional. Ergonomic wireless optical mouse, wireless trackball, presenter, and slide controller with programmable buttons. Chargeable over USB or DC power. Works out-of-the-box in Linux without external drivers. So proud! :)