The primary goal of a presentation in a seminar in our lectures is to teach the other students and to make them understand the main ideas, techniques and concepts of your subject/publication. A good presentation helps the audience to learn a lot without getting flooded with irrelevant details. Thus, it is not the goal to provide every detail of the underlying publication (in this case, it is recommended to read the publication itself), but to find the right prioritization, accessible explanations, and good examples. It is also not the goal to show, that your subject is the most complex one, which nobody but you understands. Try to guide your audience and help them to focus on the essential parts in a step by step explanation.

It is recommended to regularly take a listener perspective during slides creation:

• Do the listener have all the information at hand to understand the current slide? Is it easy to remember all the necessary details and are they provided shortly before the current slide? Do I need to repeat some aspects?
• How do I make the listener focus on the aspects I am talking about just now?
• Does the listener have enough time to read and understand everything on the slides? Many people are not good at reading and listening at the same time!
• Is it possible for the audience to re-follow the presentation after they got lost? What are good points to recapitulate the outline of the presented and guide the audience back on track?
• Are there pitfalls or things that can be misunderstood easily? How can you help the audience to avoid misconception? You can also ask the audience about some presented aspects in order to check that they understood you correctly.
• What would help yourself to understand the presented information easily?

In general, use your own experience as a listener to presentations and think about parts where you had trouble to follow and techniques you liked or disliked.

The following guiding principles are collected based on our experience in several seminars and should outline the best practice. Of course, there are almost always exceptions to the given principles and there might be innovative other approaches. However, if you deviate from the principles, you should have a good reason to do so.

• Avoid full sentences! Especially avoid nested sentences, that require the full consciousness to understand them correctly.
• Use Colors, highlight important parts and keywords, such that is possible to catch the main aspects of the slide. Use a consistent coloring scheme.
• Do not put everything you say on the slides. The slides should support your talk in order to remember important parts, show formulas, make graphical examples, etc. They are no script and are not intended as a stand-alone source of information.
• Try to reduce clutter! Remove unnecessary distractions like hard to read fonts (use sans serif fonts), unnecessary layout elements, and fancy stuff (that does not guide the audience). Avoid chaotic layouts.
• Try to avoid to much text on a single slide. Instead use multiple slides and repeat the relevant parts on the other slides. Try to keep the visual appearance of repetitions to help recognition.
• Use boxes, separators, and so on to group content in suitable chunks of information.
• Use pictures, graphics, graphs! A good figure might say more than a thousand words and is often much easier to remember. Creating pictures, graphical examples, etc. might be one of the major tasks to create a good presentation! Do not use scanned plots and figures. They are usually hard to observe.
• Avoid unnecessary formulas. Do not use formulas, if they can be explained by showing some figures, schematics or pictures.
• Only use pseudo code if you cannot think of a better presentation form. The audience usually needs a long time to read and to understand pseudo code. Thus, you should guide them through the code, and give them the necessary time to understand the code. Try to avoid overly complex mathematical formulas in pseudo code.
• Use page numbering for easy reference in later discussion.
• Do not use useless animations!
• Use slide topics to give a content summary.
• Proofread your slides! Use a spell checker.
• References should contain the name of all authors and the year of the publication. Highlight them typographically, e.g., [Schwarzenegger, 1984].
• Practice your talk loud. Do this 2 or 3 time at a minimum. Measure your time, in order to find the right amount of content presented on your slides (it usually decreases about 30-50% from the first to the third try!). Do not rush and think about the right places to make pauses for your audience.

A notebook, projector(16:10 aspect ratio, 1920×1200 pixels) and presenter will be provided. If you have special requirements (e.g. extraordinary file formats (see below)) you can also bring your own presentation device. Please contact your tutor in advance to make sure, that you have the right display connector.

It is recommended to provide the slide in PDF/A file format in order to maintain maximum compatibility with the provided presentation device. It is also possible to use the OASIS Open Document Format (file extension “odp” / Libre-/Open-Office and others) or the Office Open XML format (file extension “pptx” / MS Word) file formats. In the later cases, please inform your tutor about your choice and make sure that only standard fonts are used. Alternatively, you can provide your own presentation device.

Please provide the final slides one day in advance by email to your tutor and the organizational contact of the seminar. Alternatively you can bring a USB-A drive.

• The presentation slides should have an aspect ratio of 16:10.
• The title slide should contain
  • Title of the presentation / the presented literature
  • The names of the publication authors
  • Your name
  • Title of the seminar and the department