The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint

I cam across a Blog by Guy Kawasaki today with a comment in relation to the amount of Overbearing and over-prepared powerpoint presentations that he has to put up with. His advice is simple

I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

I know exactly what he means - students often spend more time looking at fonts and background colours than they do thinking about the size of font or the style and setup of the slide. Kids find the concept of design a difficult one to grasp and need a lot of help in thinking about what a good powerpoint looks like! In recent months I have maybe gone even further than Guy and if I give a PowerPoint homework exercise I will now give a 6 slide maximum. However, this often means that the kids just cram more writing onto the slides, stand with their back to the audience and read the slide. One of these days I will get through a batch of presentations that does NOT do this!

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