Not least among the many blessings arising from Olivia Mitchell's PowerPoint Design in 2009 project, for me, was discovering Jennifer Kammeyer's post on PowerPoint research. As many of you know, I have been a big fan of using empirical research as a basis for figuring out what works in presentation design, and so I am delighted to come across someone else who shares the same passion.
Jennifer's post includes a number of studies that I had not come across before, including one about headlines:
students were better able to recall the main assertion of slides when presented with a full-sentence headline written as an assertion compared to a word or phrase headline (Alley et al., 2006).
My own work on the empirical research about effective presentation design is summarized in a brief article I wrote for Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer's Evidence Based Management site, and presented in much more detail in Advanced Presentations by Design.