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?")...
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Don't know about the academic world, but when I make a slide deck, I'll usually put a date on it. If my cow-orkers want to track it down later, it's unambiguous whether a given deck was shown at a specific meeting.
So help me, I put animation on a slide I'm using on Monday. I don't even recognize myself any more.
Adding a date (as well as topic information) can be very useful for presentation slides since the information is very often shared around electronically and/or printed out.
Being able to look as a single page of useful data (say a graph or chart) and then being able to track that back to either the person or dept that presented it (who would be further assisted by knowing when they presented it) can make it a lot easier to get to the core data and references that were distilled to make the presentation.
If you must do slideware, then you must read Tufte first. Start with this:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
and then follow up with his excellent Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Also, be aware that there is a lot of *very bad advice* out there on creating slides - if you see anything on the maximum number of bullet points, slide animation, or other such dreck - run away!
Tufte also offers one-day courses, and if you are at all interested in making effective presentations, the course is well worth taking.
Oh - and to answer your question: Logos are generally a waste of space - certainly you do not want to put them on *every* slide.
Generally I only like to use institution logos at the top and bottom of the presentation, and put funding logos wherever my coauthors are. But I do tend to use slides templates which fit the institution somehow, as tastefully as possible: generally a white slide with a border of the institution's primary color.
P.S.
If you do find the time to read "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" I would be very interested in your reaction.
In fact, I will buy you a copy if you will follow up with a brief review - just send me an email to take me up on my offer.
The last slide presentation I gave (which was the first slide presentation I've given, which is why I'm still excited about it!) had my name and the event name/year in the header. I figured if I wind up doing this more than once (and who knows), people will want to connect "That talk on rule-based programming" with "That talk you gave at a con in 2009". Reinforce context.
As for distracting logos at the bottom of the slides... I put a choose-your-own-adventure game at the bottom of the slides, one line per slide. I'm not claiming this wasn't smartassery, but nobody came up afterward and *complained*...
Truly, you live in a different world.
When I give a presentation, I don't really have an option except to use the annually updated and mandated slide deck template. And this is in the company where we presumably already know who and where we are.
(This is presumably both a legal thing and a coordination thing-- a big design review for a system, for a customer, can last for a week. It does kinda look tacky if the slide style changes every half hour.)
We also put the date on the title page, because a large number of our presentations become legal/technical/process documentation. We can't just show a sheet of paper saying we held a critical design review, we have to produce significant documentation proving we did, and what was said at the time.
Quite honestly, if I could get away without putting logos and funding agencies on my slides all the time then I would. I would rather just concentrate on the meat of the talk. Usually I feel guilty enough to list them though.
Oh - and to answer your question: Logos are generally a waste of space - certainly you do not want to put them on *every* slide.
I can definitely see the argument for this. I tend not to do it, and I assume that the major reasons that people do are either institutional habit or so that latecomers to a talk can quickly see who the group is. This doesn't tend to be a big sticking point for me in talks, though.
From what I've seen of Tufte's complaints about Powerpoint, it seems to me that the arguments should be mostly aimed at the authors of crappy talks and not with Powerpoint itself. I understand that the design of a tool is likely to influence the ways in which the tool is used, but I don't think it's terribly difficult to use Powerpoint to create a good talk. The most common flaw I perceive in talks is a failure to gauge the audience properly and Powerpoint has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
I don't think it's terribly difficult to use Powerpoint to create a good talk
Stipulated that it can be done. The trouble with PowerPoint is that it makes it so much easier to create a bad talk. Mandatory official slide templates and excessive use of institutional logos are two of the ways PowerPoint makes it easy to give a bad talk.
What's wrong with both of these things is that they have a tendency to take up too much space on slides--space that often could be better used for bigger figures or for allowing enough room for your bullet points that you can display them at a size somebody in the back row can read. (Yes, too many people try to put too many words into their bullet points, which compounds this problem.) At a conference/seminar/colloquium I don't need to be reminded every slide that you are Joe Blow from the Department of Metaphysics at Erehwon State University working with the Three Letter Agency-funded Awesome Collaboration; I have program notes and/or announcement e-mails to tell me this. I do need to be able to read the axes on the plot you are talking about.
As Novak points out, sometimes there are valid reasons for using a template. If your presentation documents a deliverable, then yes, you need information like date, institution, and contact name. Your average scientific presentation is not a deliverable, so save the slide real estate for the things that need to be there.
I put place and date on my talks, usually, for a very simple reason - so that when I browse through my Talks directory some time later I can recover what talks I actually gave where and when. I need to do this for various activity reports, but continuous updating wastes time and is futile due to random format changes in reports; so I batch process and make sure each talk has a time/place tag somewhere in it.
I work in a government lab. We are supposed to put the agency logo or identifier on each slide, but I make it very small. If I need space, I nix them except on the title slide, because most talks I give aren't archived, and no one high up from my agency goes to my conferences (I'll be at DAMOP next week).
Wow. There are a number of things wrong with the arguments in the comments. First off there's the assumption that the only place the slides would be used is in the talk, the one time, being given by the person who composed the slide. In the era of google, this is quite unlikely. The extra identifying information (who, where, when, maybe other things) is useful for people who end up finding thees things online, if nothing else for assessing where in the state of the art the topic fits.
Dates need to be on every slide because slides often get "borrowed" and recycled in other talks and presentations, often by people other than those who gave the talk. Funding option information, I'm glad people aren't confused about that (apparently newer students make that mistake a lot; I did, but only once).
Oh, It's amazing!