Book review: Designing Science Presentations: A Visual Guide to Figures, Papers, Slides, Posters, and More
August 26, 2015 Filed under Blog, Featured, Posters, Potpourri, Presentations, Publishing, Reviewing, Uncategorized, Writing
Here is another in my series of reviews for books that I read a while ago and were sitting on my desk waiting for the time to write the review.
This review is of Matt Carter’s Designing Science Presentations: A Visual Guide to Figures, Papers, Slides, Posters, and More
The chapters are short and to-the-point. Subsections are mostly just a page or two, making it easy to pick up and read when time is tight. The author does not try to lay out too much information at once, as you hope for a book on helping people improve their communication skills! (Hint: Not all books I’ve read are so clear.)
The book is printed in full color with lots of graphics (some on nearly every page), again breaking up the text and providing a light and airy read.
Another thing I like about this book is that it has one of the largest sections on posters of any book that I’ve seen (over 30 pages). Posters are a forgotten part of many books about scientific presentations, although at most conferences they represent the bulk of the scientific content and abstracts!
So, if you liked my book, then I recommend Designing Science Presentations: A Visual Guide to Figures, Papers, Slides, Posters, and More
Yesterday I received my copy of the book “Designing science presentations. A visual guide to figures, papers, slides, posters and more” by Matt Carter that I purchased from the Elsevier store. I was shocked to find that the book was illustrated in low quality black and white. This is in sharp contrast with the “Numerous examples of high-quality figures, page layouts, slides, posters, and web pages to help stimulate readers’ ideas for their own presentations” feature advertised in the Elsevier page. In addition, materials from this book found in the web always show full color illustrations (e.g., Google Books preview feature shows numerous illustrations in full color: https://books.google.es/books?id=7_QyOqDeg2YC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v=onepage&q&f=false), and I have access to the electronic version of the book through my institution and it is illustrated in color. Furthermore, his book, dubbed as “a visual guide…” loses its purpose completely if the illustrations are not in color. Notably, the complete chapter 4, entitled “Color”, contains multiple B&W figures illustrating appropriate and inappropriate use of color in scientific presentations. This is as useless as a black and white Ikea catalog or Van Gogh painting book. The fact that illustrations are B&W is not advertised anywhere, and the information as presented in the Elsevier web page and elsewhere in the web leads the buyer to believe that illustrations are full color.