Many learned to make two spaces behind a sentence in school, but you are not using a typewriter anymore, so just insert one space.

Why space-space is a no-no?
First of all, most typewriters used non-proportional fonts where every character is of the same width. For instance, consider a word like “skiing.” The lower-case i takes up the same space as the n. Having the two “i” after each other means there is a lot of white space. While reading, our minds separate sentences based on space between sentences. But, if there is an “m” at the end of a sentence, followed by another wide character, only separated by a period and one space, the resulting white space visually appears to be less than between two “i.” In other words, typewriter typefaces were designed in a way that all the characters occupy the same amount of space. These are so-called non-proportional fonts or monospaced typefaces (wide characters are squeezed; narrow characters are unnaturally wide). An example for such a monospace font is Courier.

See the example below.

However, practically all fonts used on computers are proportionally spaced typefaces, where the width of each character is customized to accommodate the natural shapes of the characters. As a result, the type sets more tightly, which makes word spaces stand out more. And, to conclude, this makes a single space after a sentence a sufficiently large white space, or visual cue, to separate two sentences.

When I explain this I often hear that people understand this, but for them after decades of writing like this there is no way they can change the habit of adding an extra unnecessary space after a sentence. You can try to use AutoCorrect options in your text processing software replacing automatically “period-space-space” with “period-space.” However, this does not work for Microsoft Word 2003.

Many of you might know some things about typography. For instance, most people adhere to rules, like “Always use sans serif fonts for digital displays!” or “Never use italic type on the Web.”
However, there’s more to typography than just following a few rules. Actually, there are many rules and some of them are more relevant than the others.

Here is the first important rule or concept: Hanging Punctuation!
Hanging (aka “Hung”) punctuation means that left aligned (or, for that matter any vertically aligned blocks of text, but lets stick with left for the explanation) need to be extended when they begin with punctuation marks, like a quotation mark. Without that adjustment, a left aligned text in a text block will appear indented (Figure 1).

Compare the same text block with proper typography adhering to the principles of hanging punctuation (Figure 2). I would recommend to follow this rule when working on headlines or sub headings and do not bother with it when you deal with a long text because this kind of manual adjustment would make a lot of extra work. Another tip along the same lines is to dramatize the quote by setting the quotation marks larger than the type. I would do something like that, for instance, on a scientific poster about a qualitative study where I cite verbatim quotes from my subjects.

If you want to learn more about this subject, take a look at the bible of typography “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst.

PS (3/23/2009): I just read a blog from CreativePro about the same topic. They noted that in Adobe InDesign you can specify that hanging quotes should always be used by checking “Optical Margin Alignment” which can be accessed in the Story palette, which is located under Type in the main menu.

Recently, I picked up a story in Slashdot which discussed a complicated visualization problem. Mathematicians and physicists work all the time with more-dimensional objects or ideas, but how do you show this to the layman who cannot read the formulas? The videos on Dimensions-Math show some clever tricks to get a feeling for what four dimension are like. The techniques begin by imagining how two-dimensional creatures, like those in Edwin Abbot’s Flatland, could get a feeling for three-dimensional objects. ScienceNews‘ Julie Rehmeyer reports as well about these mathematicians who are freed in their imaginations from physical constraints.

Typography doesn’t sound like something which could be fun, but I saw a 3-minute video which shows what you can do with characters. In this TED video, Rives tells a typographical fairy tale that’s short and bittersweet. Watch Rives: A 3-minute story of mixed emoticons!

This post will start a series of typographical postings which intend to explore the basics of typography. If you want to design a poster or a chart or anything which includes text, a basic understanding of typographical concepts and the application of the most important typography rules is essential.

Video and other media usually enhance a presentation. But, they need to be designed well (no cheesy YouTube videos). In general, a video is much better than a live demo. I have yet to witness a live demo that worked perfectly and started without delay or setup during the presentation, which makes every audience restless.
Here are two very different examples of videos produced to showcase projects. The first one is a demo of an online community which we have created for a grant-funded project. The Digital|Vita system was designed by a team of masters students in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. It allows users to manage biographical information, output this information into several commonly used formats (e.g. NIH biosketches), and assemble research teams through expertise location and a social network. The system is currently in the prototype stage. It was put together in Adobe Premiere Pro and took quite a time to produce. Goto the project page and select a video based on your bandwidth.

A much more low-tech approach can be accomplished by using a video camera and a well-lit table and a few pieces of paper. I have seen this the first time on YouTube with a video about the “My Location” feature on Google Maps. We have reused this idea and you can produce a decent video with little effort.

“Complementary” in regards to fonts often refers to a combination of serif font and a sans serif font. But, the creative combination of both is often the tricky. See Figure 1 for an example of the combination of a serif with a non-serif font for a logo for an online community.

Note: If you use non-standard fonts install these fonts on presentation machine (or embed fonts in presentation). In general, nothing renders fonts as well as Adobe Acrobat Reader. Thus, consider displaying a full screen PDF show instead of PPT.

Color evokes feelings! There are two general categories of colors
• cool (blue and green)
• warm (orange and red)
Use cool for backgrounds because cool colors recede from us into the background and use warm colors for objects in the foreground, like text because warm colors move objects towards us.

While not strictly color related, you want to consider the following advice: If presenting in a dark room, use a dark background with white text; but if presenting with lights on, use a white background with black text.

You can learn more about colors at CreativePro.com which provides an introduction to color use for Website, but the information is good for presentations as well. If you are interested in learning more, I suggest you visit the Color Matters which even explains why school buses are yellow.

You should use one visual theme throughout your presentation because you want to surprise your audience with the content and not with the layout. Do NOT use a PowerPoint template—your audience expects a unique presentation, they can browse these templates on their own and don’t need you for that. One way to use PowerPoint templates without using the Microsoft provided ones, is to create your own PowerPoint file as a Design Template (.pot), or pay a professional to do it for you! The other option is obviously to use Photoshop to create your template and then use layer comps for each slide which will be exported as PDF. See this example of the visualization of research streams at the Center for Dental Informatics where I am working which uses a consistent theme. Research at CDI.

Here it comes to the question of how can you undermine your professionalism as a presenter most efficiently. There are three ways to do this well: (1) use many PowerPoint clip arts; (2) download logos and low resolution images from the Internet; and (3) integrate cartoonish line into every slide.
If you want to create good slides, take your own images of real people. Why of real people? People connect to your audience emotionally—a cartoon doesn’t. So, what can you do if you have no time to take pictures of your own? You can easily buy stock photography for $3 at iStockphoto.com in suitable resolution. If you do not want to spend $3, cancel the presentation. Compare below Figure 1 with Figure 2-5—no explanation necessary!

Now, lets see how we can visualize the same content:

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (Leonardo da Vinci). The best slides may have no text at all. Show slides and NOT speaker notes! Slides are visual aids, not “text aids”! If your slides show what you say, the issue is: Why are you there? Here we come back to John Sweller and his Cognitive Load Theory: “If the information on the screen is the same as that which is verbalized, Power-point presentations can backfire because the audience’s attention will split between the speaker and the screen.”
Slides need to reinforce your words, not repeat them (adapted from Seth Godin).
You often here about the “3X4 rule” which says that you should have three bullets per visual and four words to a bullet. I actually do not like this rule since it enforces using bullets which is only in some instances a good idea, but in most it is not. Think about how to create a visual slide without text.