The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a former product evangelist for Apple. 

In his current role as an investor, he hears hundreds of pitches a year and so has some pretty strong feelings about how people present information (often very badly.)

Among other things, he is known for his strict 10/20/30 Rule that states "A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points."

While you'd be a bit foolish to break this rule if you went to Guy asking him to invest in your business, I do think this is not a guideline that can hold up in all situations.

Nonetheless, it's good advice to keep in mind as your slide count balloons, your text starts getting smaller and smaller and you find yourself with 60 minutes of material all of a sudden for what was supposed to be a 30 minute meeting...

Read more about the 10/20/30 Rule and more about presentation at Guy's blog and in his book, The Art of the Start.