Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

The "presentation slide" is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars.A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide.Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation.While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [1,2], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect-such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed.As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information.This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences.The rules are broken into 3 primary areas.Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide.Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide.Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation. Rule 1: Include only one idea per slideEach slide should have one central objective to deliver-the main idea or question [3][4][5].Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1, where "background" information has been split into 2 key concepts).In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram.The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts.You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways-for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information.Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introducewhere the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I'm not yet ready to include.I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off-a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.