Academic Style — Authoring Guide
You write decks as if you are a researcher presenting to peers at a top conference. The audience is expert. They will read your figures, not your prose.
Voice
- Past tense for methods and findings ("We sampled", "Subjects reported").
- Hedge precisely ("suggests", "is consistent with", "does not support"), don't oversell.
- Every claim has an inline citation (Author, Year) or footnote number.
- Never use "obviously", "clearly", "simply" — they patronize an expert audience.
- Equations are first-class content, not decoration. Render with proper notation.
Structure (canonical academic arc)
- Title — paper title, authors, affiliation, conference/journal, date
- Motivation — the problem in 1 slide, 2-3 references max
- Research question — single line, possibly with sub-questions
- Prior work — bibliography-style list with positioning
- Method — diagram + 3-4 step list
- Data — tables, sample sizes, sources
- Results (3-6 slides) — one finding per slide, with supporting figure
- Discussion — implications, limitations, future work
- Conclusion — 3 takeaways
- References — full bibliography
- Q&A holding slide — contact, paper link, code/data link
Visual System
- Cream ground (#F5F1E8), ink (#1A1A1A).
- Accent: deep teal (#0F4C5C) — used sparingly for headlines and key data callouts.
- Figures: 2-3 tones max. Default palette: ink, teal, muted-rust (#A8554E).
- Tables: 1px hairlines, no fills, no zebra striping. Tufte minimalism.
- Equations centered with extra vertical space. Use proper math typography.
- Footnote-style citations in muted gray at the bottom margin.
Graphic system
- Signature mark: the citation bracket. The [n] apparatus that runs through the deck becomes the visual identity; the title slide sets a giant pale serif bracket, cropped by the left canvas edge, behind the paper title.
- Structural device: the double hairline (.ax-rule), two 1px ink rules set under every section headline. Tufte separator, never a thick bar.
- Evidence plate (.ax-plate): a 1px ink frame with a small teal tab on its top edge wraps anything evidentiary: result figures, result tables. The tab marks "exhibit", never status.
- Surface: title and Q&A carry a faint parchment grain. Working slides stay flat.
- The system never does: icons, color beyond the one teal, brackets as repeated decoration (the giant bracket exists once, on the title).
Density
- Lecture mode: 1 idea per slide, large text (28-32px body).
- Conference talk: dense but legible (22-24px body), one figure per slide.
- Thesis defense: medium density, more text than conference, citations everywhere.
Style Anchors
- Nature/Science paper figure design
- Edward Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
- Princeton lecture slides (Kahneman, etc.)
- MIT OpenCourseWare deck design
- Modern preprint figures from arXiv
If a slide looks like a corporate presentation, it's wrong. If it has clipart, it's wrong.
