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Appearance
You might brush your teeths, spend some bucks on a haircut and ensure your cloths are tidy. In general, just keep in mind: you want the audience to listen to you, else you just could handout folders, therefore is a sophisticated appearance quite supportive.
Clothing
Clothing is important, not as important as people think, but still important. The one and only rule is to clothe properly, i.e. don't wear a suit when the audience is wearing casual and vice versa.
Slides
Appeal
Slides should always look good (i.e. simple blue background with white DejaVu Serif might be ok for a 5 minutes preparated presentation, but not for a serious talk). Good looking can mean a lot, e.g. graphically advanced, integrated with corporate identity or representing the personal appeal of the talker. Either way it shouldn't look too cheap.
Content
Slides shall help the audience to follow the talk easily, not be the talk, i.e. don't write full sentences, don't write a complete story -> keep it short but informative.
Usually it's good to keep 2 things in mind when writing the content:
- The audience will associate the content (actually the way the content is written) with you.
- The audience will associate you with the company/project/thing you're talking about.
This means that you should try to get some personal touch into the slides, but don't do anything which might result in bad appeal of you, because if the appeal is strong enough, it will trespass on the talk's topic. The major guidance is: never put too much content on the slide, never put too few content on the slide, and never put boaring content on the slide.
Total taboos:
- political opinions
- serious indignity of strange people
- cusses - in case the audience might even notice and not like it
To sum it up: there is no such thing as a general rule for good slides, it's most probably a mixture of appeal, content and the way you present the content.
Talk
The most important rule is: keep the audience's interest (at all costs!!! even if you have to bare yourself!).
Some tips to easily archive this:
- You should probably know the slides very well, best thing is to know the upcoming slides before you switch, this makes the talk smoother because you can connect from one slide to another without thinking or something
- Answer questions as they appear, this always gives a good break from the actual talk
- Integrate the audience in the talk, e.g. ask questions
- Don't talk monotonic or too fast
- Use the slides direclty for the talk, i.e. don't hold yourself on the speaker's desk, but move around in the area available and use your hands to show stuff on the slides.
- In general don't only rely on mimic but also on gesture