A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

John Spencer, via a recent Division for Planetary Sciences newsletter (which you should all be members of, and should have gotten), provides the following simple guidelines for how to design graphics for your next talk:

• Don't use a complex image as a slide background—it's distracting and reduces legibility.
• Don't show bright green (or worse, yellow) lines on a white background. They may be much more visible on your computer monitor than when projected.
• Similarly, don't show pure blue lines on a black background
• Beware 1-pixel wide lines and fonts
• Be sure plot axis labels are large and clear enough, particularly if they are from a published figure. Consider overwriting axis labels with new ones in a larger font if necessary.