10-20-30.
What do these presentation guideline numbers refer to?
10 for ten slides total in your presentation. I know your shaking your head but stick on.
20 for twenty minutes to deliver it. Even though you may have been assigned an hour, with all the time it gets lost to set up the computer, the projector and all those things that never go right during important presentations your 20 minutes is easily stretched into 40. So if you figure in having the time for a serious Q&A session, which is the true salt of any great presentation delivery, you see that using more than twenty minutes for your presentation delivery is really unnecessary. I myself can't really stand presentations lasting more than 15-20 minutes unless they are truly outstanding.
30 for the point size of the text in your slides.
Yes, the size of the text in your slides. Think how unreadable are the slides of all those presentations we see around conferences, with text so tiny and so cramped that not even the presenter can read it without getting close to it. And then if you need to place so much text because you are afraid of not remembering what you have to say, well then you are just missing the point of the presentation itself: this is a visual complement to your live presentation and not a public outline of your personal notes as to what you will need to say. You are the one that has to involve, entertain, launch questions, expose critical information. The slides should only serve to augment those actions by providing a visual, complementary element to your own words. Not an echo!
Needless to say that the more text you put on a slide, the more difficult it is to be read, and the more out of synch you will be with your audience, who will often go ut of its way to make sure it can read ahead of you, on the screen or on your handouts, everything that you say.
So 30 points is a call to legibility and to few, very few keywords on each slide.
Back now to the 10.
Ten slides only?
Well, here too, the idea is to be simple, straightforward and concise and to carry out a presentation that is centered around few critical and well presented points.
According to Guy, if we were to generalize and if you were a venture capitalist or better yet someone trying to sell a business idea to someone these ten slides could be:
1) Problem
2) Your solution
3) Business model
4) Underlying magic/technology
5) Marketing and sales
6) Competition
7) Team
8) Projections and milestones
9) Status and timeline
10) Summary and call to action
But then again, if you were presenting a paper on the status of the marine fisheries in South-east Asia your sequence and topics may be a little different.
So what is important here to understand is that, presentations that are short, concise and to the point, do work better than long and winded presentations with many slides and lots of information.
Remember that you can pack all of the stats, references and extra data you would like to show to your audience in an online set of web pages, or even in the printed handouts that you can distribute at the event itself. There is no need therefore to insist in showing huge quantities of data and stats if the large part of the audience doesn't even understand your key points.
