What distinguishes the alternative design is the rigorous application of these two features with specific layout and typography guidelines. These guidelines, which were chosen to make the communication efficient, memorable and persuasive (Alley, 2003a), have been refined through critique sessions of more than 400 technical presentations given over four years at Virginia Tech.

In these presentations, engineering graduate students and seniors explained and persuaded an audience either about research or about solutions to technical problems (Alley and Robertshaw 2003b). At the end of each critique session, the audience discussed what details from the slides they had comprehended and what details they remembered. Each year, the lessons learned from these discussions were incorporated into the design guidelines taught to the next class of graduate students and seniors (more than 200 each year).

The final product of these four years of critique sessions is the alternative design discussed in this article. Table 1 presents the guidelines for this design. Interestingly, a number of the recommendations that deviate from the traditional design (the sentence headlines, the supporting graphical evidence, and the limitation of text blocks to two lines) mirror what Doumont (2005) independently concluded.