No More Conference Presentation Templates

PolicyViz Newsletter #42

Hi all,

In-person conferences are definitely back. I’m heading to Georgetown on Thursday and Friday for the Government & Public Sector R Conference and was in Indianapolis for a total of 20 hours last Friday-Saturday for the American Evaluation Association (AEA) annual meetings. It’s what I saw at the AEA meetings that reminded and inspired me to write this week’s post: Why, conference organizers, do you insist of having slide templates?

In case conference presentations are not your cup of tea, here is the basic way it works. You submit a paper proposal—you might submit on your own or as part of a larger panel, say, with 3 or 4 other papers. If you get accepted, you will have, usually, something like 5-15 minutes to present your work to the audience. As part of the presentation process, some conferences will provide speaker tips or guidelines, and some will provide an actual PowerPoint template.

But most of the PowerPoint templates I’ve seen are not especially useful. Why do they need a banner at the top or a logo at the bottom? Why is any branding necessary? We all know we’re at the conference and the conference isn’t an entity that owns the content, so it’s not like they are publishing the slides anyways.

Furthermore, most conferences are not so strict about using the templates that everyone uses them. Of the six presentation decks I saw at AEA, only two of them used the actual template. So if the conference isn’t being strict about it and they serve little purpose other than forcing presenters to follow some arbitrary layout that doesn’t go beyond what one could easily do directly in PowerPoint, what’s the point?

Take a look at these two PowerPoint templates, one from the IEEE conference and another from this year’s AEA conference. The banners at the top and bottom of the IEEE template and the top banner in the AEA template both take up about 18% of the total area of the slide. That’s a lot of space for unnecessary shapes that don’t help present the content!

Instead, I would encourage conferences to provide useful templates. What might that be? A useful, engaging title slide and a prompt to not end your presentation with a “Thank You!” or “Any Questions?” slide. It might also be useful to provide some alternative layouts to the standard vertical bullet point list. I like the basic set up shown in the slide below—it basically encourages the speaker to shorten the amount of text and to orient the list horizontally rather than vertically. Nolan Haims has a really good set of cards and templates for some of his alternative strategies to a list of bullet points. There might also be some good lessons using some of the new PowerPoint tools like Morph and Designer.

I’d love to see more examples of bad—or good—slide templates you’ve been asked to use in your presentations. Were the event organizers strict about making everyone use them? Did they provide other tips or tricks for a successful presentation? What has your experience been with presentation slides and templates?

That’s all for this week—be sure to check out this week’s podcast, a few upcoming conferences, and some cool new things I’m reading; all below.

Thanks,

Jon

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Things I’m Reading & Watching

Articles

• Words Matter from Elizabeth Grimm

• Equitable Communications Guide from Innovation Network

• The Tribal Digital Divide: Extent and Explanations, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

• Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can

  Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization, by Eli Holder and Cindy Xiong Bearfield

  • Blog post: Polarizing Political Polls

• Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Data Physicalization, by S. Sandra Bae, Danielle Albers Szafir, and Ellen Yi-Luen Do

• A Guide for Choosing Graphics, Congressional Budget Office

Data Visualizations

• Supreme Court justices interrupt female attorneys more often than men, Axios

• Climate Disasters Drain US Emergency Fund, Adding to Government Shutdown Risk, Bloomberg

Conferences

• 2023 Government & Public Sector R Conference (October 19-20, 2023)

• Art and Science of Data Visualization video course (with Skillwave)

Job Openings

• Web Development Product Manager (Office of Communications), Urban Institute

TV, Movies, Music, and Miscellaneous

• One Piece, Netflix

• Only Murders in the Building, Hulu

• The Morning Show, Apple TV

• The Silo, Apple TV

• Shrinking, Apple TV

• Audioslave, just Audioslave

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Sponsor: Maryland Institute College of Art

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