Academic

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)

1. Title — paper title, authors, affiliation, conference/journal, date
2. Motivation — the problem in 1 slide, 2-3 references max
3. Research question — single line, possibly with sub-questions
4. Prior work — bibliography-style list with positioning
5. Method — diagram + 3-4 step list
6. Data — tables, sample sizes, sources
7. Results (3-6 slides) — one finding per slide, with supporting figure
8. Discussion — implications, limitations, future work
9. Conclusion — 3 takeaways
10. References — full bibliography
11. 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.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: SlideSpeak
• Source: SlideSpeak/slide-design-skill
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://slidespeak.co

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.