How to use PowerPoint effectively 
2. The basics of slide design
Get the .pdf file and read with a cup of coffee
Guy Kawasaki is a venture capitalist based on the west coast of the United States of America. He spends a lot of time listening to people pitching their business and looking for finance. From his experiences of being at the receiving end of hundreds of PowerPoint presentations a month he developed the Guy Kawasaki 10-20-30 rule of PowerPoint.
To this seminal physical law I have added a few of my own. The aim is to make presentations which stand out from the crowd so that we never loose an opportunity to communicate something vital to our audience.
One big thing before we start – by all means use the presentation templates supplied with PowerPoint – but only if you want your slides to be unreadable and blend in with the décor of the conference room. This may well suit your purposes; it’s not everyone that has a vital message to communicate!
Simplicity
Each slide ought to be simple and clean. There is not enough real estate on a PowerPoint slide to waste any of it on clutter. Design your slide to have a monastic simplicity. This means that most of your pre-prepared PowerPoint backgrounds are useless – go through your collection and throw out all but the most simple.
Contrast
Design high-contrast slides so that the detail can be seen clearly even in a brightly lit room. I gave a presentation in a brand new lecture theatre in the University of Reading last month. Everything was state-of-the-art, even the spotlights which blazed directly at the screen bleaching out almost any image you threw onto it. Almost any image, but not my high-contrast slides! You cannot control the environment you present in – bear this in mind when you prepare.
Point size
Now for Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule; a presentation should contain no more than ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and you should use no less than thirty-point lettering. Remember this applies to presentations in a commercial environment, in other environments you will talk longer and need more slides. But you should never ever put words on a PowerPoint slide that are less than thirty-point. There are two reasons for this.
First, below thirty-point healthy eyes will struggle to see your words but about eleven percent of your audience is visually impaired in some way or other – you have more chance of including them if you use the biggest point-size you can get away with.
Second, when you come to print out your handouts the words on them will be legible. Imagine that at your next conference – you may be the only presenter that day to distribute readable handouts!
A final hint to ensure your text is readable. A lot of people (especially children) find words written entirely in upper case rather difficult to read, avoid this.
A minimum of slides
The other bits of Kawasaki’s rule are still useful, even if you are like me and regularly speak for thirty to forty minutes. If I have more than ten slides for a forty-minute talk I need to give myself a good reason, if I am going to speak for that long I had better be pretty riveting! A quotation from the great seventeenth century preacher George Whitfield is useful here; “If a man would preach for more than thirty minutes he had better have the voice of an angel - and have angels for hearers!” But even if you are not an angel, you don’t need too many slides.
One slide equals one point
The last rule limits the amount of stuff you can get on a slide. What if you have more words than will fit? If you have complex data build your case over several slides but make sure that each slide makes one simple point. For example, don’t throw a six-point bulleted list at your audience all at once; build it up a bullet point at a time; give each piece of information to your listeners when you need them to see it and not before.
Beauty
When you are choosing a background or designing a slide look for something that you find beautiful to look at. Most clip art is below standard, but you can now get wonderful photographs and high-quality artwork from image libraries at very low cost. Look for this and spend a bit of money on it – if you like the look of the slides you are showing, you will be very confident when you unleash their message at your next conference!
Let’s summarise the five simple rules that will change your presentations forever.
Each slide should be simple and clean 
High-contrast slides can be seen
Text should not be less than thirty-point
Use a minimum of slides
Present complex data over several slides, one slide equals one point
Make your presentations visually beautiful
Pack a slideshow that follows these rules and you will get your point across – even in a hi-tec lecture theatre in Reading University!
If you have not read it already, you may now like to read the first article in this series The three gifts of PowerPoint
©Dave Burke 2007