In earlier articles I’ve pointed different perspectives on how to be creative. I’ve introduced the importance of Visual information and the color illusions that can handle your work while presenting a presentation. And in today’s article I will walk you through the colors that can help you with the presentation environment.
Yes! Creating a presentation is indeed the biggest task, but let’s ask – what’s the point of creating stuff that doesn’t sync with your audience which is majorly due to the color sophistication?
Learning from my past experiences, here are four key facts I keep in mind while designing a presentation.
- Concept & Information
– Collect as much information as you can, after you’ve done collecting – start storyboard it before you step to the next. - Supporting Visual Information
– Collect or create visual information that supports your concept - Slides
– Create slides that are good in color, theme and other informative stuff - Vocal support
-A presentation is a car without the engine if it has no vocal support. So practice out loud till you present.
I’ve covered the first two points already. So let’s dive straight to the third one which is “Slides” and the first one that comes to my mind is Color.
So how to choose colors? Let’s explore this concept with an example, see the figure below that contains two color pallets with the text.
Which one from the above is comfortable to your eyes? Red? Or Green?
Tip: Try hiding the one pallet with your hand and read the other and later try reading both.
Obviously you will choose Green because your eye is fine while examining the information in it, whereas the Red causes irritation to your eyes and it takes some time to figure out the information in it, and when you try examining the both at the same time you may find red distracting your focus and this what makes your audience uncomfortable. So, from the above example you’ve learned to choose the colors that are eye friendly.
What colors are eye friendly? And How to choose colors out of them?
We all know that colors are explained in RGB and CMYK models, RGB refers for Red, Green and Blue, by combining these colors you obtain other colors that we see around everyday. CMYK refers for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black), possibly K is used instead of B because it’s already used in RGB for referring the blue color and CMYK is used for print versions. So from these models let’s explore colors that are eye friendly.
Let’s start with the Red family:
As explained above with the figure, too much red can divert your audience from the concept you are presenting, but manipulating the levels of the Red you can achieve colors from the same Red family that are eye friendly, such as the one below.
Now let’s compare the above figure with the top most figure and see which one among both is more eye friendly, see the figure below
Now you will find red as more readable than the green. So what we learn from the above example is — the good the subtle color you use, the good is the readability and eye friendly presentation you can present.
Here are some subtle colors that can add more attention to your elements within the slide. Let’s start with the red first, below figure shows you color pallets that are formed from Red.
And this below figure shows you the color pallets formed from Green.
The below figure shows you the color pallets formed from Blue. If you observe the last row you’ll find the lite solid blue pallets text color turned to black and this can be applied to Green and Red if you have the light shades.
Now that we have the idea on subtle colors let’s explore some examples, let’s start with Red again.
The above slide shows you a company’s sales reports that are actually running in loses. And below figure is the slide that has Green background representing profits.
If you see the sample slides above, you’ll learn that Color speaks what you want to present. And as always I encourage you to learn about colors that can help you make your presentation slides sync with your information.
