Geoff Holden

This is my little rant about bad presentations, inspired by a link about “The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint” link I saw on digg. Now, I don’t claim to be a perfect presenter, or even a very good one, but I like to think that I give a reasonable presentation.

The “10/20/30 rule” that Kawasaki puts forward is that your presentation should have no more than 10 slides, last no longer than 20 minutes, and use no smaller than a 30pt font. I think these are pretty good guidelines, so long as one remembers that rules are meant to be broken.

The 30pt font rule is very important for pretty much everything. I’ve seen far too many presentations that have so much text crammed onto one slide that you can’t digest (or even read) it. What generally happens in these presentations is that the presenter stands up and reads that text to the audience–that’s not the point of having a slide, the key point should be up there and the presenter should explain it. The only reasonable exception to this is if there’s text that’s not meant to be read during the presentation (i.e. references, etc.).

The 10 slides and 20 minutes are points that are more open to

interpretation. I think that they are a good guideline for the type of presentation that Kawasaki was talking about (a pitch to VCs) and most presentations in general. He says that people will only remember 10 key points in a meeting and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, for that kind of presentation. On the other hand, the majority of presentations I’ve had the opportunity to give have been fairly technical ones, with a pretty specific audience. The presentations we schedule for the St. John’s Linux Users Group are generally either 90 or 45 minutes (including question and possibly demonstration time), that’s a pretty far cry from his 20 minutes, but it can be made to work.

I think for a longer presentation the ratio of slides to minutes is very important. If you’re spending less than two minutes on a slide, you’re either going too fast or the slide isn’t important enough. If you are not at least 95% sure how long it’ll take to give your presentation, practice it. Personally, I can judge how long I’ll take to give my presentations, and can make them fit nicely into the timeslot so I don’t generally practice presentations. I’ve seen too many presentations that have enough content to fill an hour that have been crammed into fifteen minutes. This makes it look like the presenter is not properly prepared, and can be uninteresting for the audience.

The other part of the longer presentation is that it’s hard to keep the attention of your audience. If it’s just slides and talking I think that you have to keep the talk under an hour and keep the rest of the time for questions and discussion. If the presentation has interesting demonstrations, I think you can get away with being somewhat longer, because the demonstrations will break it up and keep people interested. The other thing that longer presentations need is an overview slide at the beginning, as well as a summary at the end. The overview will act as a map for both the presenter and the audience, knowing that you don’t plan on talking about one little thing the entire time can help keep the audience from drifting off. The summary should bring back all the key points from the whole presentation, i.e. ‘If you remember 3 things from this presentation, these should be it:…’.

Now that we’ve covered ‘the 10/20/30 rule’ time for a few of my own suggestions. Lose the transition effects, they’re pointless and nobody is impressed. Don’t use a theme that came with Powerpoint, either make your own (remember to keep it readable) or use regular text on a background. This is more important when your presentation will be grouped with others, such as students presenting to a class; you’ll stand out more with black text on a white background than those themes (not to mention that many of the included themes are ugly).