PowerPoint Design: The 5-5-5 Rule
PowerPoint has become an important part of business life in the 21st century, often being utilised as a powerful tool for presenting information and communicating messages during meetings.
While most of us are familiar with the software functions, delving deeper into PowerPoint’s features and functionality reveals it offers more benefits than might at first meet the eye. It can transform data that may initially seem complex or mundane into engaging, creative and easily understandable visuals.
A PowerPoint presentation is a useful tool for enhancing meeting effectiveness, with its positive impact increasing, depending on how well the content has been designed and presented. A well-crafted presentation will help delegates understand and remember your words, enabling them to make informed decisions.
Choosing the perfect venue
Hiring the appropriate venue is vital to set the mood, with London meeting rooms proving popular among teams of all sizes to provide a professional, well-designed and comfortable setting for your event.
Meeting room hire in London allows you to enjoy the benefits of purpose-built meeting facilities, far away from the distractions of the regular office. This leaves you free to focus on the matters in hand, outside your regular working environment, at a choice of convenient locations with access to transportation and accommodation.
Flexible seating layouts in a contemporary business setting, with unlimited tea, coffee, biscuits and water and the latest tech such as LCD TV screens, AV equipment and fast wireless broadband sets the scene for a successful meeting. The rest is up to you.
What is the 5-5-5 rule?
Many business professionals base the format of their PowerPoint presentation on the 5-5-5 rule. This means ensuring there are no more than five lines of text per slide, no more than five words per line and no more than five minutes spent on any slide.
Utilising these simple PowerPoint presentations tips can play a crucial role in informing your audience and enabling strategic decisions. Studies show that typical data, in a text-heavy traditional format, can lead to confusion and disengagement among attendees. Being in a meeting where the speaker continually reads data from a sheet can turn into an unproductive and even tedious experience.
By incorporating visuals such as graphs and charts into the meeting, data instantly becomes easier to comprehend and more accessible, improving audience engagement. Thinking about how to make a PowerPoint presentation based on the 5-5-5 rule is something every business professional should do before the next meeting.
Why should you use this method?
Visual aids can often communicate more effectively than words when it comes to text vs visuals. Every one of us will have attended a PowerPoint presentation where the slides contain great walls of text. The average brain struggles to read and listen at the same time, so when presenting to an audience, keep the text on each slide to a minimum to engage delegates and stop their thoughts from drifting off elsewhere.
Employing the 5-5-5 rule means replacing rambling paragraphs with short and sharp memory joggers on each slide, and replacing blocks of text with visuals to reinforce a point. People tend to remember strong images over words and each slide should act as a cue or summary, so using full paragraphs isn’t necessary.
When you’re in charge of the presentation in the meeting, think about what YOU would like to see and what would retain your interest, then simply incorporate this into your strategy.
Adopt a consistent approach
Consider using templates as you build your slide deck to maintain a consistent approach throughout. Maintaining consistency in colours, font styles and themes can be challenging when starting from scratch, so designing an interesting template that can be modified to incorporate your messages is a good strategy.
Microsoft Create contains many pre-made, customisable PowerPoint templates for inspiration, with the colours and fonts already set, if you’re struggling for inspiration. Choose a template from an easily accessible gallery, customise it to meet your personal needs and you’re done.
Ensure the presentation is easy to read for all attendees, even for those at the back, by considering the appropriate use of colours and fonts. Take into account whether your chosen font style and size is readable, even for people who have a visual impairment. This is why the 5-5-5 rule is so useful: trying to squeeze too much text onto a slide, making it hard to read, is a major contributor to meeting disengagement.
All text should be at least 24 points, in a colour that assures good contrast on each slide. The simple rule of thumb is that a light background should have a dark font and vice versa. Don’t be swayed into using unusual fonts and colours because initially it grabs the attention if it’s going to give delegates a headache due to eye strain after 30 minutes.
Should you use animation?
The answer is yes, but use animation sparingly, as although it can liven up a flat presentation, too much of the wrong type can distract from the content. It may seem attention grabbing and fun to have objects flying on and off the screen, or zooming around continually, but in reality, it can be confusing and can start to look unprofessional after a while.
Subtle animation can have benefits, but overusing it can ruin an otherwise great meeting. As you progress with designing your PowerPoint presentation, keep asking yourself whether the particular animation you’ve chosen is going to enhance what you’re aiming to put across, or distract from it.
Engaging your audience
Avoid those awkward moments and silences before the meeting begins by taking steps to engage your audience from the outset. No one wants to step up in front of a room full of people scrolling on their phones, getting distracted by work emails, or, even worse, checking their social media feeds. Once people are distracted, it makes your job even harder if you have to pull them back before you start.
Rather than just having a title slide on the screen, create “kiosk slides” containing a combination of interesting subjects for delegates to look at prior to the start of the meeting. This can be anything from interesting and relatable images to amusing quotes or fun facts to set the tone. Perhaps there’s a relevant question you would like your team to think about before the session begins. Create the relevant slides and set them up on an automatic cycle beforehand to give attendees something to think about.
PowerPoint presentations and the 5-5-5 rule can be customised to suit all industries. If it’s something you haven’t considered before, why not try it for yourself?
