Tips for speakers

From Perl

lirell trourol As always with tips, YMMV.

• Secure a laptop on which you'll be doing your presentation. Make sure it looks like you want it to at 1024x768, which is what most projectors can display. (Better: find out for sure. Some only do 800x600.) Colors will be a little bit off, so either don't care about colors too much or calibrate in the classroom much like musicians perform balance before a gig.

• Have a plan for what to do if your laptop dies the night before your talk. (I don't mean "Panic". I mean something like, "I'll need to: 1. borrow a laptop running linux; 2. wget slides from $URL; 3. install frobtz version 4.117. Yes, this is a lot like deploying software at a client site.) If you are precisely the opposite of me and have everything prepared well in advance, consider burning a livecd with your talk. Make a spare.

• Dark on light, high contrast == visible. Light on dark background == audience in the dark, sleeping.

• Large fonts.

• Minimize typing. Unless you are Audrey you type slower than your audience thinks.

• Think about presentation styles you've seen in real life. Optimize for delivery to your live audience, not future readers online. (Personal example: I thought Takahashi style was too videoclippy and populistic. Now that I've seen it in action I'm considering learning to use it myself.)

• "What are you saying to help me with the problem you assume me to have?"