Medical Illustrations to Improve Your Presentations

Producing professional and engaging presentations is increasingly important in modern work life. As a medical artist, Joanna can deliver medical illustrations that improves communication in your presentations, plus put it all together for you as a complete package, providing ready to use files for your presentation. Contact Joanna to talk about creating artwork plus putting it together with your text, as a PowerPoint presentation.

Advantages of Illustration within Presentations

Presentations should always complement rather than over-power the words of the speaker. If you use too many words in a presentation your audience will focus on reading your presentation and not listening to your voice. It is also important, especially at medical conferences and other large events to make your presentations engaging, as the audience will often be seeing many in a relatively short space of time. Similarly, if the presentation is intended for patient communication, they need to be drawn into the presentation to ensure your message gets through and that the illustration teaches and educates.

The use of medical illustrations to improve your presentations falls under the saying a picture speaks a thousand words, more importantly good medical illustrations help speak your words as the presenter. By having slides with customised medical illustrations, relating to your subject matter, enables you to visually engage with your audience, while at the same time allow the language part of their brain to be free to process what you are saying. The image catches their attention and then your words can drive the message home.

There is also the factor of understanding - words and text go only so far in their communication, but a good medical illustration or a series of medical illustrations can greatly increase the level of understanding for the audience. For example, you may be talking about a new surgical technique that you have pioneered and for this you want to talk the audience through the various stages and show in detail how your new technique and surgical innovation brings benefits. What better way to illustrate your innovation to your peers than to have custom drawn medial illustrations for your presentation. They can see on screen exactly what you are talking about, and by avoiding a presentation full of text, you keep their attention and enhance their understanding. Click here to see an example of an illustration of a sigmoid colectomy surgical sequence.

Software for Creating Your Medical Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint is the most commonly used presentation software programme in business. It allows you to create master templates and then add your content, words, images and now sound and animations into your presentation. If you are adding medicall illustrations in a PowerPoint presentation you should have them optimised for screen use which is 72dpi. If you add in images of a higher resolution then you can make the PowerPoint file very large and this can result in it running slowly - sometimes you see presenter clicking for PowerPoint to go forward and then it jumps two slides because they were impatient and clicked twice. If you are asking me as a professional medical illustrator to produce medical art for a presentation I will always undertake the image resizing for you.

Google Apps

While PowerPoint is still the most popular presentation software the free Google Apps system contains a presentation tool you can use. This is not as highly featured as PowerPoint and you must be on a live Internet connection when you are creating the file but it does have benefits such as being free and more importantly the way you can use it to easily publish your presentation to the web. For medical presentations this is becoming increasing important as people often want to review the presentations again afterwards. Adding presentations that you have done to your business website or to your professional blog can increase the value to your website visitors. There is more information on using medical illustrations to engage with people online on the Website & Online page.

Google Apps also has bebefits in terms of being able to collaberate on presentations with other people. It is therefore possible for me as your medical illustrator to log in and add medical illustrations directly into your presentation. As with PowerPoint, ensuring that the images are the right size and format is important as you have to upload the medical art from your local computer to the Google server - if your file is too big or the format incorrect it will not work.

using a graphical approach in the form of slide shows that accompany the oral delivery of any topic. It is used in business and training sessions and useful to surgeons and healthcare professionals. With this programme to hand, Joanna can create your Powerpoint presentation, to include original illustrations and diagrams to compliment the text, and all put together as 'ready to go' files.

Powerpoint is self contained and all its features are included, what will make yours stand out, is the creation of bespoke illustrations that explain complicated medical matter to the audience, and bring originality to a presentation. Powerpoint is a user friendly programme, and once set up, the user simply has to mouse or click through the pages.

Contact Joanna to help you set up your presenation for that all important meeting.