Scientific Storytelling Expert Blog

VISUALSTORYTELLING

Everyone employed in marketing, medical affairs, learning, and training encounters the challenges of communicating complex, scientific material in a clear and accessible manner. This expert blog contains advice and best practices for presenting scientific information to your target audience, from pedagogy to design, technical specs to usability, timelines to costs and everything in between.

Why pharmaceutical companies need a visual storytelling agency

November 30, 2020/in Learning and Training, Video and animation, Scientific slide decks, Interactive Tools /by Stefan Wolf

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies today work with many specialized agencies to position their brands and develop their communication goals for different therapeutic areas. It is often difficult to determine which tasks can be performed by which type of agency.

Why it makes sense to hire an outsourcing agency instead of creating slide decks internally

October 27, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Stefan Wolf

PowerPoint presentations are extremely powerful tools to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies reach their communication goals. They can serve as eLearning courses, scientific platforms, or live-presentations at (virtual) congresses. Unfortunately, despite this potential, the development of PowerPoint slide decks often does not get the attention it deserves. Read more

Analogies – thinking outside the box

October 26, 2020/in Scientific slide decks, Interactive Tools, Scientific Images & Publication Figures, Learning and Training, Video and animation /by Stefan Wolf

Medical and marketing managers in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry are often faced with the following problem: Despite having produced extensive materials, they still fail to get their key message across to the target audience. Read more

How a clear goal makes a better slide deck

August 25, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Thomas Frei

Today we are going to discuss why not having a clear goal is a reason a slide deck might fail. But why do our slide decks need a goal in the first place? Think about it! Read more

Bringing scientific study data to life with animation

September 3, 2020/in Video and animation /by Stefan Wolf

Academic publications present scientific studies and clinical trials in a text-heavy format. That means several pages of black print on white paper. Read more

Making Scientific 3D Computer Animation that Pays Off

August 31, 2020/in Video and animation /by Colin Korell

The three rules for when to use 3D computer animation in MoA and MoD videos

When it comes to mechanism of action and mechanism of disease videos, 3D computer animation is the gold standard. 3D animation can help an audience fully understand how a drug blocks a receptor or how a virus infects a cell. Read more

How to transform a boring slide deck into an exciting scientific visual story

August 19, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Stefan Wolf

It’s true. PowerPoint presentations have a bad reputation in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. All too often, they’re boring and stuffed full of information that nobody can remember, or else so badly designed that they leave audiences bewildered. And yet every day countless new bad slides are created for yet more yawn-inducing presentations. Read more

How slides can be significantly improved with three simple steps

August 7, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Eva Anne Rentzsch

With today’s slides, the “before and after” effect is not immediately obvious, but we still have some tips for their improvement that can be applied to many other cases. Notice that the initial slide uses the same colors for both the left and right infographics. This is misleading for the viewer, because the representations actually have nothing to do with each other.

How to present facts with visual storytelling

August 5, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Eva Anne Rentzsch

Today we want to look at an example of how facts can be either lost or presented with impressive visual storytelling. The initial slide lists too many facts as boring bullet points, so the target audience is forced to read text instead of focusing on the presenter.

How simple infographics can add value to your presentation

July 29, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Eva Anne Rentzsch

Today’s slide illustrates how simple infographics in combination with precise statements can add value to your presentation. The original slide shows a clear gap between visuals and texts: the visuals fail to support the content, misdirect the viewer’s focus, and are even misleading.

Transforming a boring image with bullet points into a slide reflecting the beauty and complexity of nature

July 23, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Stefan Wolf

Today’s slide is meant to introduce a more extensive topic but, with its dense text and unimpressive graphic, it would fail to excite a target group’s curiosity.

How poorly designed slide decks can have devastating consequences in the pharma industry

July 16, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Thomas Frei

If you work in pharma, you’ve probably seen cluttered, text-heavy PowerPoint presentations. The kind of decks that make you squint to read the miniscule axis labels and make you strain to follow the logically incoherent structure, only to give up after the third slide.

Understanding the concept of an anti-tumor vaccine

July 6, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Anita Kunert

In today’s episode of our series “How to make complex medical science accessible”, we will show how we turned a complex immunological cascade set off by an anti-tumor vaccine into an easily understandable step-by-step sequence in PowerPoint.

How to build better slide decks

June 17, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Thomas Frei

Today we explore the simple, practical, concrete steps you can take to develop more effective and engaging slide decks for scientific communication.

Stress response physiology

April 23, 2020/in Scientific slide decks /by Stefan Wolf

In today’s episode of our series “How to make complex medical science accessible,” we would like to use an example to show how to turn a complex slide about physiological processes in the human brain into an easily understandable animation sequence in PowerPoint.