Presenter Guidelines Venom Day 2025
Presentation Guidelines:
- Standard oral presentations are 15 minutes long (12 minutes for presenting and 3 minutes for questions)
- Lightning talks are 5 minutes long. There is no dedicated time allocated for Q&As (see below).
- Posters will have their own dedicated session in the afternoon; exhibitors will be encouraged to stand next to their posters to talk to attendees.
Technical Guidelines:
- Standard oral & Lightning talks must be in MS PowerPoint (.ppt or .pptx) or PDF format prepared in landscape orientation with 4:3 aspect ratio. Should there be any complications with operating system incompatibility, please contact the organising committee at: venomdaybangor@gmail.com
- The presentations should be emailed to the organising committee 24 hours before the day at the latest (deadline 23:00, 4th December). Presentations should additionally be brought via USB stick, to the room on the day, in the event of technological issues. A helper will support you with loading your file in the auditorium's laptop.
- File names should include the time you are starting and your last name (e.g. 1015_Doe, 1645_Smith).
- If your presentation contains embedded videos or other multimedia, please also include them in a folder with your presentation (in the event of technological issues, the content is still available). We recommend that you test playing these videos with the staff during the break before your session.
- Please include a final slide with your email or any other way you want to be contacted to answer further questions (especially helpful for the online audience who won't be attending refreshment break networking opportunities).
Standard oral talks
- Audience questions will be asked after your talk.
- Q&As will be live-streamed. After your presentation, please wait on-stage for any questions from the online audience, these will be read aloud by the chairs.
- Be aware that the audience is of mixed experience, career, and academic stage; please avoid overly technical or difficult words, and jargon, or ensure that these are clearly explained (including abbreviations).
Lightning talks
- There is no dedicated time for Q&A session after lighting talks, please prepare for questions during refreshment breaks. Due to this, please include a final slide with your email or any other way you want to be contacted to answer questions (especially helpful for the online audience who won't be attending refreshment break networking opportunities). The breaks following lighting talks offer a great opportunity to answer questions and engage in discussion, this will be heavily encouraged by the chairs, throughout the day.
- Be aware that the audience is of mixed experience, career, and academic stage; please avoid overly technical or difficult words, and jargon, or ensure that these are clearly explained (including abbreviations).
Poster guidelines:
- Must be a physical A0 (84.1 x 118.9 cm, 33.1 x 46.8 in) poster, oriented vertically (portrait).
- Printing services are not offered by Bangor University. This is organised and sourced externally by the presenter.
- Must be set up prior to the conference day. Preliminary date of Friday 5th December 2025 for set up; time and further details TBC.
- Boards, pins, tape & Blu-Tac provided at venue, as well as the support of the event volunteers.
- Be aware that the audience is of mixed experience, career, and academic stage; please avoid overly technical or difficult words, and jargon, or ensure that these are clearly explained (including abbreviations).
All talks will be streamed live. Access to this live stream will only be available for the participants of the conference and will only be accessible for the duration of the conference. In case you would not like your slides or posters to be photographed or used in the advertisement of the day, on social media, please mark them clearly with the "No Photo" icon (example below), and make the audience aware of any sensitive slides when introducing your talk.
Attendees will be reminded to avoid taking images of sensitive slides on the day, by the chairs. Bangor University, its Herpetological Society, further organising committee and extended groups cannot guarantee or be held liable, should images of sensitive slides be
shared in any way by attendees from the event, this includes screenshots or screen recordings that may be taken by the online audience.
More Information – Inclusivity & Accessibility Tips:
Standard & Lightning talks: Tips for making oral presentation slides more inclusive
- The font size used in the slides should be legible from a distance, we recommend using font size of at least 24 for the body text and larger for headings.
- High contrast and distinguishable colours should be used for text and graphics (e.g., black on white is preferable over dark blue over light blue)
- Colourblind friendly palettes are encouraged, but not compulsory. You can read more about this here (hyperlink)
- You can easily check whether your slides have good colour contrast by viewing them in grayscale (Select Start > Settings > Accessibility > Colour filters. Turn on the Colour filter switch, and then select Grayscale. Visually scan each slide in your presentation for instances of color-coding)
- Within Microsoft PowerPoint you can also use the Accessibility Checker which will automatically alert you to areas of the presentation which can be improved (more information here)
- Use simple, easily readable fonts, avoid ornamental fonts
- Graphics and videos without narration should be described by the speaker, if possible/applicable provide closed captions for embedded videos, if playing a video via YouTube please enable closed captions
- Where possible, avoid using colour alone to distinguish between categories in graphics, the use of different symbols (e.g., in scatterplots) or patterns (e.g., in bar plots) are encouraged.
- Technical terms and jargon should be defined or explained for clarity.
Tips for giving an effective lightning talk (for first-time speed talkers):
- Keep everything brief, on point and be clear (for non-specialist audience) – just the minimum necessary background, goals, the basic approach, the key findings/conclusion.
- Limit number of slides to around 1 per minute and try not to include too much text. You don’t need to go into heavy detail, try to avoid presenting too much data.
- Visuals are a good way to engage the audience but try to avoid videos and animations.
- Let the audience know where to find you or how to contact you if they have questions (especially helpful for the online audience who won't be attending refreshment break networking opportunities).
Tips for making your poster more inclusive:
- The poster should be readable from distance of at least 2-3m, we recommend avoiding smaller font sizes.
- High contrast and distinguishable colours should be used for text and graphics (e.g., black on white is preferable over dark blue over light blue)
- Colourblind friendly palettes are encouraged, but not compulsory. You can read more about this here (hyperlink)
- You can easily check whether your poster has good colour contrast by viewing it in grayscale (Select Start > Settings > Accessibility > Colour filters. Turn on the Colour filter switch, and then select Grayscale. Visually scan each slide in your presentation for instances of color-coding)
- Within Microsoft PowerPoint you can also use the Accessibility Checker which will automatically alert you to areas of the poster which can be improved (more information here)
- Use simple, easily readable fonts, avoid ornamental fonts
Important dates:
Presenter application (Abstract submissions) deadline: 23:45, 12th November, 2025
Presentation (Oral Talk files) sharing deadline: 23:59, 4th December, 2025
Poster & stall set-up: (Afternoon, details will be sent to applicants), 5th December, 2025
Venom Day Pre-Social: (Evening, details will be sent to attendees), 5th December, 2025
Venom Day: All-day, 6th December, 2025
We thank you for taking the time to read through our guidelines and advice for Venom Day 2025, we look forward to your presentations, and seeing you here in Bangor later this year!
Regards,
University of Bangor Herpetological Society, and extended organisational team
