 Welcome to this presentation with simple advice on making a good slide deck. When you give a scientific talk you typically have a slide deck and I think we've all seen presentations with bad slides and everybody blames PowerPoint. I have my slide. I've used it for almost 20 years. It's very distinct and very minimalist and I make the slides in PowerPoint. I only say this to point out that it's not about the tool. The problem is how you use it. My way is not the only way. It's one of the ways to avoid the problems of traditional slides. So let's start with the root cause. What is the problem? Traditionally we had physical slides and that meant that more slides would cost more money and for that reason you want to put more on each slide to save slides. Of course now slides are free and that leads to the temptation of having more slides with the same design. Therefore we now have the rule of thumb that you should spend about two minutes per slide to avoid people cramming too much content into their presentations. However what often happens is that people now look at their slide deck and go oh no I have too many slides. After which they take the same content and cram it into fewer slides. Remember slides don't take time. Content takes time. If you present the same content it will take the same amount of time regardless of whether you have fewer or more slides. The first big problem is text on slides. When you're giving an oral presentation and at the same time have written text often in the form of long bullet lists you run into the problem that people cannot read and listen at the same time. This is less of a problem if you have identical sentences in the sense that you're saying the same thing as is written on your slides but in that case you're effectively reading from your slides which does not make for good presentation. If you have non-identical sentences you're just confusing the audience. So both are bad. What's the solution? I think the solution is to have keywords on slides that help underline the main points of your oral presentation. That way your slides are supporting you, not competing with you. Another issue is figures on slides. Don't get me wrong, figures are good. Figures are good in scientific presentations where we use them to explain the workflow and show the data. But there are several problems. We often have too many figures, too complex, too small and too many of them on one slide. Complex figures with multiple panels are common in scientific papers and the reason is that we want to show everything but have crazy limitations from publishers on the number of figures we're allowed to present. When you're giving a presentation you don't have a figure limit you have a time limit and that means that you should only show what you have time to explain. You should try to simplify your figures so that they're easier to explain and whenever you have multiple panels you should ask yourself should I compare them? Because if not, put them on separate slides which allows you to make the figures bigger, causes less confusion because people only have one figure to look at at the time and takes the same time because you're still presenting the same amount of content. You should also care about the design of your slides. I subscribe to Simple is Better because it minimizes distraction and I have to admit that that sometimes clashes with the template you get from your employer, be it a university or a company often wanting to show design elements and logos. Consistency also matters. I think we've all seen the presentations where some famous professor apparently sent an email around to the group sent me some slides and the presentation looks like they took a pile of slides from different people and put them together. If you want to look professional you should pick one font, you should pick one color palette and you should stick to it. Finally, I want to highlight that there are many right ways. My style is just one solution to avoid the problems that I've described. There are other solutions that are equally good. For example, I've seen presentations with only figures and empty black slides in between allowing the speaker to effectively turn off the projector when they were not talking about a figure and just talk. I've also seen presentations where photos were used as a backdrop with each photo illustrating a broad concept that was being talked about for perhaps five minutes without any other slides. That's all I have to say about slide design. If you want to learn more about how to give a good presentation take a look at this presentation next. Thanks for your attention.