More evidence for why data visualization/infographics skills should be mandatory for academia

In the past few months, I've attended quite a few talks by academics that are established professionals in our field. Even in the talk with the most interesting studies, I cannot help but be distracted by their presentation slides whenever I see things that I just really, really, really, want to fix!

The image on the left is a picture I took from a slide at a job talk for a faculty search (meaning: this is a very important presentation for this person!!). Although the study was actually really interesting, I was distracted by the figure. I think it's great that the speaker used color, but sometimes I think simple and clean can actually look much better. I decided to do a quick (less than 5 minutes) version of this figure in PowerPoint as an example.

I didn't change any of the information. I just re-arranged it and used a different type of graphic. I personally think it looks better, but obviously, that's subjective!

The next slide was from a presentation at an ABCT symposium. This presentation was in a fairly large room (could probably sit more than 100 people).

Although I am sure that the figure is informative and probably even useful, I honestly could not read it and I was sitting in the 2nd row.

I would like to believe that without taking this class, I would still do a better job, but looking back at my most recent presentations tells me otherwise!

Here's a screenshot of my last presentation (from February of this year). Mind you, this was a poster (so ~48 in x 36 in). I admit that I still stand by my color scheme, but in terms of organization and being able to follow the point of the poster...

Well, I definitely could make improvements!