Hylke
15 January 2009
Microphones, headers and contrast
Posted in Efficient email, Presentations quality, Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientistsI read the Survival guide with great pleasure and find it very useful and many times very amusing. A few comments/recommendations.
1. A useful addition to Presentation Guide 5.B.4 Sound. Although a speaker should face the audience as much as possible, we all know that for the majority of presentations, people are facing the screen at least 25% of the time. Please place the wireless microphone on your jacket/sweather/shirt on the same side as the screen is. This will avoid a complete dimming of your voice when you punt something out on the screen.
2. The majority of the Email Guide has an even page header showing ‘Presentation Guide’ (this even continues at the index, not very appealing). This mistake is very inconvenient during browsing when the Guide is used as a reference book .
3. Beautiful tips, guidlines and examples of a proper use of contrast is present in the book. I hope this will reduce the specially annoying talks at conferences where the speaker still thinks that the light green color of Origin is visible at all. Therefore I was quite amazed when I read the back cover in the evening in the presence of a 20 W light bulb. I could not read the information below the white text! Next day I found out it was information about the author. Of course this information is of minor importance and not interesting, but it is a nice example that a proper contrast can’t be achieved for two sets of text in black and white, on the same colored background or text box.
Many thanks for writing the guide, I’ll recommend to all my (future) colleagues.
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15 Jan 2009 16:11, Ad Lagendijk
Hylke,
thank you very much for your comments in your post. I do not know how long ago your post had been submitted before it was noticed by me. For some stupid reason Wordpress does tell me when a new comment has been submitted, but it does not tell me when a new post has been submitted.
Sorry.
Thank you for your Tip 1. I certainly will use it.
While I was preparing the ebook version I noticed already the mistakes with the headers. The third printing is about to be printed and many of those mistakes should have disappeared.
Thank you for finding the mistake on the back cover. You are absolutely right. It had escaped me. It also proves my point that professional designers are very sloppy about contrast. When I give presentations about the book I often show a few covers of recent issues of professional magazines: These covers are always very busy and texts poorly legible.