Speaking of conferences (as we were a little while ago), the Female Science Professor has a post on the phenomenon of logos in talk slides:
Do you put your institution’s logo in your talks and on your posters at conferences? If you put a logo in your talk, do you put the logo on every slide or just on the title slide? Is institutional logo-ing more common on some continents than on others?
Logos on slides are one of those things that in principle, ought to be annoying. In practice, I’m usually just grateful that they’re not using one of the godawful default slide layouts that come in PowerPoint, with a huge distracting graphic covering half of the screen.
I do occasionally put a small college logo on talk slides (we have a whole “Graphic Identity System” with a half-dozen different logo graphics, that I would link to if it were accessible from off campus), but I try to keep it small and discreet, off in one of the corners where it won’t interfere with actual talk text.
The worst thing, logo-wise, is people who are reporting on collaborative research involving several institutions, who feel compelled to tile the logos for all the members of the collaboration across the bottom of the slide. It’s hard not to start judging them on their relative aesthetic merits, often to the point of missing what the speaker is saying.
I’m also with the FSP in favoring a small acknowledgment of funding on either the title slide or the conclusion slide, rather than a separate slide just listing funding sources. My preference is also to list co-authors and collaborators on the title slide, rather than throwing in a huge list of names on a slide of its own. This can get difficult with a large enough group, though.
The other slide-design thing that I find puzzling is the tendency to create slides listing a specific date and time for the talk. This is probably pretty trivial to do, but I’m not entirely sure what the point is, especially for a seminar talk that you’re going to give multiple times. Are people really so worried that somebody will steal their data that they need to establish priority on every slide?
But then, I don’t even like putting dates on class handouts. I invariably forget to change them the next year, and end up with students bugging me about why I’m using handouts from Winter 2003 (“Why would I change it? Do you think the laws of physics have changed since then?”)…