Academic Slides

This is for building academic slide decks and research talks: conference presentations, thesis defenses, lab meetings, paper-to-slides conversions. It walks you through narrative structure first (forcing you to answer what problem you're solving and why related work matters), then slide breakdown, design rules (one idea per slide, claim-style headers), and delivery prep including Q&A backup slides. The counterintuitive rules section is the most useful part: your slides are not your paper, text-heavy slides make audiences stop listening, enthusiasm beats polish. It'll generate the .pptx files directly and includes templates for talk outlines. Designed for researchers who know their content but need structure for turning papers into talks that people actually remember.

skills.sh installs: 501
GitHub stars: 488
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add evoscientist/evoskills --skill academic-slides --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Academic Slides

A structured approach to creating academic presentation slides and preparing research talks. Covers narrative structure, slide design, visual hierarchy, delivery technique, and Q&A preparation.

When to Use This Skill

User wants to create presentation slides for a research talk
User asks about structuring an academic presentation
User needs to prepare for a conference talk, thesis defense, or lab meeting
User wants to design a slide deck from a paper or research project
User mentions "slides", "presentation", "talk", "defense", "poster talk"

Before You Start: Three Questions

Before designing any slides, answer these questions clearly:

What works are you presenting? They must share a coherent research direction. If presenting multiple works, they should form a narrative arc — not a disconnected list.
What problems do these works solve in that direction? Each work should map to a specific problem. If you cannot articulate the problem in one sentence, you are not ready to present.

SKILL.md on GitHub