Color Can Kill
Color is an important design tool. The right color scheme will make the slides in a PowerPoint presentation visually appealing and can help emphasize your key points in subtle, but unmistakable ways.
However, the overuse or unintentional use of color can hurt your message by distracting or annoying your audience or otherwise detracting from their viewing experience.
Colors have meaning
Consider which colors go into your slideshow carefully. This might seem like a silly question to ask yourself, but it’s a serious one: What is your favorite color? Do you know why you like it?
Many color connotations come from natural associations and go back to the earliest human instincts. For example, fire is red. Fire is warm and energizing, therefore we view red as an energizing color – many food related logos use red. Rain clouds are grey. When it’s raining we stay inside and feel lazy. Therefore, gray is a subdued and low-energy color.
Other connotations come from cultural references. Green means go. Yellow means caution. Still other colors have industry-specific connotations and will affect the way information is perceived. We talk about blue chip stocks. In business, red is the color of debt, while “staying in the black” is a good thing.
Spend some time seriously thinking about messages you may be sending the audience with your color palette.
Use contrasting colors
The color wheel is a design tool for mixing and grouping colors. PowerPoint’s color picker is based on the color wheel. Setting up the color palette or color theme with deliberate choices for both contrast and harmony is one of the first things to do when creating a template. Pick colors that work together.
Color also affects how easily something can be read. Using text in PowerPoint that contrasts poorly with the background is a sure way to create hard-to-read slides and frustrate your audience. Low contrast means that the reader’s eyes don’t know what to focus on. Use combinations that stand out from each other without clashing. Also, keep in mind that people often perceive colors differently, and monitors and projectors display colors differently, as well.
Use colors that match your brand, the template, make text readable and highlight critical information, and you should be fine.
Color is a tremendous design tool to enhance the visual value of your presentation, but if used improperly, it can distract and frustrate an audience. Because your goal is always clear and effective communication, make sure that the colors used in your slide show help that goal, rather than hinder it.
Want to learn more about how to effectively use color? Watch video #6 above.
