Description
Large Slides
Many slides are now bigger because they include more details.
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What is the strange red rectangle? It's the "aspect ratio helper" which you can enable in book.toml
. From a bit of experimentation in a meeting room, this rectangle shows roughly how much content we can fit on a screen.
The existing slides don't always fit! They have gained weight over time, as more and more facts and details have been added. That's very relatable and a comes from a good place: people want to cram in as much great information as possible 🙂
An example from the new course is the pages on structs. It used to have 21 lines of code and it now has 30 lines. It didn't fit super well before, and now it's really too large:
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My impression is that less than 10 lines of code is best. 15 lines can work, but then you only have room for 1-2 lines of output!
Combined Slides
Some slides in the new course combine content what was shown on separate slides before. Compare
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Funny enough, this style was actually how I wrote the very first version of the course 😄 I thought I could have ~10 long-form pages, each covering a bigger theme. I was then going to scroll down on the page during class.
However, the feedback from the initial review was that this would be hard to follow in class. Later, I've seen people struggle to follow along on the current slides that are too big. Scrolling up and down on a large screen in projected in front of 20 people is bad experience.
The effect of scrolling is likely not visible when teaching a remote class to participants far away — many of whom have their camera turned off. But I've seen it throw people off in a live in-person class.
Existing Style
The style I tend to follow in all my presentations is this:
- Slide title (one line)
- Body text (one line)
- Either
- a 10-15 line code block
- a few bullet points (mostly one level deep)
I find that this gives a nice consistent look. I like that there is a single line of regular text to kick the slide off and give a tiny bit of context. It also feels less jarring than jumping from a heading to a list/images/codeblock (you would never start a section in a paper with a list, you always have a paragraph of body text before jumping into something else).
We should use very short sentences in any body text or lists.
I haven't followed this perfectly, but those are the underlying thoughts.