Presentations

• Limit the amount of text on each slide. Don’t write your entire presentation onto your slides, just the key points. These don’t need to be full sentences, they can be in dot point form.
• Each slide should only cover one main message.
• Use a clear font. Sans serif fonts, like Arial and Calibri, are generally considered easy to read. And make sure to use a large font size; your text and any visuals must be visible from the back of the room.
• Check your spelling and grammar, then have someone else check it!

• Include white/empty space on your slides, try not to cram too much onto each slide.
• Avoid busy backgrounds and fluorescent colours as this might make your text hard to read, particularly for people with visual impairment or some neurodivergence.
• Use animations sparingly. Only include them if it adds to your presentation content or makes a point, do not use animation just to ‘make things interesting’ as they can be very distracting for the audience.
• Don’t have too many slides. You should have just enough to stick to your time limit while speaking at a steady, easy to follow pace.

• Try and use images or diagrams to illustrate your point rather than text.
• When including visuals, don’t use too many – maybe 1 to 3 per slide, depending on whether you are using text or visuals to make your point.
• Choose a theme or a ‘look’ for your slides and stick to it throughout your presentation, including using the same font and font sizes across slides.
• When choosing colours for text, ensure they are bold and easy to see, but not incredibly bright as that may distract or be overwhelming to some of your audience.
• Similarly, don’t use colour alone to represent something, because people with colour-blindness may not be able to discern your meaning. Instead of just highlighting a word in green, for example, put a green box around it - so at least everyone can see and understand the box, even if they cannot see that it is green.

Keep this short to save space, as you will be talking through this, and your audience may already know a lot about the topic, so a full background summary may not be necessary.

Focus on what’s novel or critical to your study/assessment topic. Use images to help convey the methods so that you can use less text.

Focus on only the most important findings of your study or the most important thoughts you had/information you researched around the assessment topic. Keep it short. You can discuss this further verbally.

This is where you interpret results or findings from your readings, discuss relationships and your own ideas and how they relate to what’s already in the literature. Bullet points are effective for presenting your key take-away points.

Summarise your ideas/study with their implications. A diagram illustrating your conclusions can also be effective here. When presenting, finish by inviting the audience to ask questions. Ensure you are well-read on the topic and have considered possible questions. For more guidance read through the section on managing questions.

You should also include contact details, such as an email address, people can use to get in contact with you. You may also like to include a QR code that links to further reading or more information about your research.

Your font and the colour should match the mood of your poster and topic. They should also be readable; remember your poster will be up on a wall or displayed on a screen. Use a sans serif typeface (Arial, Helvetica, etc.) for improved readability, and avoid extremely bright colours and background images behind the text.

Your title will be the focal point of your poster and will set the tone you wish to convey. It should quickly orient the audience without being too distracting. It should also be large and eye-catching, but without taking up too much space.

Different sections within your poster should be clear and easy to read and locate, while also having a logical order or flow to them. Whether you have them in a structured order one after the other, in a more visual mind-map or network formation, or constructed in any other way, ensure it is clear which areas are connected and how.

As with a slide deck, you should endeavour to use visual representations of your information where possible; this will enhance your audience’s understanding and retention of and interest in your talk. For posters, a suggested text-to-visuals ratio guide is about 50% text and 50% visuals.

While you want to include all your relevant information, make sure you don’t overcrowd your poster. Remember to leave some empty/white space as overcrowding can make the poster difficult to read and understand.

Getting an outsider’s perspective can be valuable with any of your work, but especially with a poster. Before you print your poster, have someone look at your design and give you feedback on the colours, the clarity, your images, and the readability, including the flow of your information. Also, have someone proof-read it all, including checking referencing, prior to printing (so that you don’t waste time and money printing it twice!)