What Color is Your PowerPoint?
July 23, 2009 by Jerry
Yesterday’s post about serif and sans serif font concluded with the Latin phrase, “de gustibus non est disputandum,” or, there is no argument about taste. The phrase is even more applicable, if not indisputable, when it comes to color choice. Well, almost indisputable, for there is a single unavoidable consideration that transcends the taste of any presenter or presenter’s designer, and that is the audience and its ability to understand the graphic.
A simple one-word rule, applicable to every element of every graphic, will make it easy for every audience to understand your every slide. And, at the risk of repeating what I have written in every post in this week’s series on graphics, if you make it easy for your audience, they will make it easy for you; the alternative is inconceivable.
That one word is contrast; and a simple way to implement contrast is to look at the classic color wheel as divided into two halves: warm and cool colors. The warm colors are the yellow/orange side of the wheel, and the cool colors are the blue/green side. By choosing a warm color as the background and a cool color as the foreground, or vice versa, you achieve contrast by default.
Yellow against blue or blue against yellow provides one of the sharpest contrasts you can create, a fact borne out by the U.S. Navy. During World War II, when aircraft carriers came into large scale use, the greatest challenge was landing the planes on the decks of the bobbing ships; a challenge heightened by the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea that framed the gray ships, creating limited visibility. To assist the pilots as they approached the carriers, a flight director stood on the deck’s landing strip and gave visual signals. To make these flight directors clearly visible, they wore yellow life vests that made them stand out against the blue sky and water.
The colors of the life vests of other personnel were chosen more for relevance than for contrast: red for ordnance, white for medical, green for maintenance, purple for fuel, and blue (the least contrast against the blue sea and sky) was for personnel who handled the planes after they had landed.
Create your slides more for contrast than for relevance. In all the Power Presentations programs, our slides follow the fleet with a bright yellow foreground text that stands out clearly against a royal blue background, as in the image on the left above.
There is one other important factor to consider in regard to contrast. Today’s PowerPoint and other graphics applications provide presenters with many bells and many whistles to create attractive slides. One of the most readily-available and frequently-used features is gradient shading. In their desire to prettify their slides, many presenters—and their designers—incorporate this feature in their design. Admittedly, gradient shading makes some graphical elements pretty, but it also makes others hard to discern, as you can see below:
So I’ll conclude with the converse of my repeated phrase: make it hard for your audience, and they will make it hard for you.
Tomorrow, we’ll culminate this series with a guest blogger who has some amusing points of view about presentation graphics.
A Joint Program of Power Presentations, Ltd. &
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I agree that contrast is the most important factor when selecting colors for your slides. The problem for most people is that we don’t know if two colors have enough contrast because we don’t have a design background. Fortunately, there are two international standard tests for color contrast that can be used. In order to make it easy for presenters, I have created a Color Contrast Calculator that can be used to test your color choices against these standards. You can use it for free at http://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/colorcontrast.htm . Now you won’t have arguments with colleagues about which colors should be used, you can refer to the tests to settle the argument.