Better slides needed at AGU Meetings

Abstract

Recent AGU meetings show a dangerous trend in the quality of presentations. A fair percentage of slides used during oral presentations consisted of a black background and colored lines and/or words for data. Such slides are illegible and serve to undercut the speaker's points by not demonstrating the data clearly.A typical example consisted of dark red, dark blue, and green data on a black background. Even the author had difficulty in pointing out the data using his light arrow. Line drawings, in particular, should not use colors, but instead use high‐contrast white‐on‐black for the following reasons: dark colors on black backgrounds provide little contrast, making it difficult to discern patterns; people who are colorblind are at a disadvantage; and the same information can be obtained using a variety of line weights (dotdash, solid, dotted, etc.) with single color slides.