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Presentation Template

For your presentations we provide you with a template that you are supposed to use. You can open it in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Open Office or the like.

Find the template here

How to use it

  1. You need to edit the master slides and include your name, the date, the event and the titel to the respective placeholder areas
  2. Create a title slide with all your info, like your name, matriculation number, title, supervisor, course or event etc.
  3. Add your slides, you can choose between different templates but you should not create your own ones.
  4. Keep the slide numbers visible and stay within the borders of the templates.

Guidance for good slides

1. Ensure visual hierarchy

  • Keep a consistent heading throughout the slides with the same size.
  • Use at most 3 different font sizes.
  • Use color and font width for highlights in the text.

2. Align everything

  • Pretend that there is an invisible bounding box that you cannot go beyond.
  • Try to keep the headline at the same position on all slides and align all following text to the left side of the headline.
  • Whenever there is a group of information, like an image and the caption, align them to each other.

3. Use high contrast colors and use it intentionally, ideally not for text, only highlights

  • Ask yourself: What purpose does this color serve?
  • Stick to the same color for the same type of information (Highlight, or System A vs. System B, Good vs. Bad, Warning..)
  • Avoid light colors
  • Pay attention to the contrast of foreground and background

4. Don‘t overcrowd slides

  • Avoid too much information on one slide, stick to one topic/message per slide
  • Avoid too many individual (small) items
  • Try not to use all of the space of the slide
  • Add spaces between different types of information/content blocks

5. Make the figures as big as possible or adjust the font size

6. Don‘t only rely on color

  • Colors will be different depending on the beamer. Colors that are very similar could not be distinguishable. Also red could come across as pink etc.
  • Sometimes the color representation might fail completely, or someone might have color vision deficiencies
  • To reuse the graphs and plots in a paper or a report it is important to add another layer of distinction, like shapes, stroke types or shades. Papers and reports are often printed in black and white and color would not be reflected.

7. Always label your plots and add captions

  • To every figure or table, add a caption!
  • Don't forget to label your plots (axis, title, legend).

Useful resources (free)

Icons, Illustrations and Images

Icons

These sites have icons that are free to use as small PNG files, mostly an attribution is required. Make sure to use different styles consistently (like outlined, filled etc.).

Illustrations

Here you can get free to use illustrations, an attribution is required: https://www.freepik.com/

Images

These sites have images that are free to use, mostly an attribution is required.

Design and Photo Editing

Photopea is a free and browser-based Photoshop alternative, where you can edit images. Gimp does the same, but is a program you can download. Since 2025, Affinity is free for everyone and it combines image editing, vector graphic editing and layouting.

Diagrams

Diagrams.net and excalidraw are browser-based editors for graphics. If you use them for your figures, make sure to download the PDF and include them into your slides or reports, as it will give you the highest resolution and is vector-based.

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