Need your help: colors in data charts PPT 2003 versus 2007

Colors in data charts. This 2003-2007 compatibility issue drives me crazy. Many of my clients still use Office 2003. Does anyone have a solution?

• PPT 2003 uses Microsoft Graph for data charts, PPT 2007 Excel
• I create a chart in 2007
• I save the 2007 PPTX in 2003 PPT format
• I (or my client) opens the 2003 PPT file and
• right-clicks the chart to open it: all the colors are off...

I have to change every color manually using RGB codes to set them permanently to the correct value in 2003.

There must be a better way to do this! Let me know if you know.

PowerPoint template colors and color blindness

My Vincent van Gogh color set from a few days ago is not very good for people suffering from red-green color blindness. Use Vischeck to test your own templates. To do so, you need to "save as" a PowerPoint page as "PNG".

A side-benefit of this test is that you get sense of what happens if someone prints your presentation on a black & white printer. (But hey, the B&W white test is the easiest of all: print preview)

Somewhat related: an earlier post about designing presentations with people suffering from dyslexia in mind.

Via Richard Garber. A more elaborate post on Vischeck and PowerPoint in this post on the Indezine blog.

"Color me creative"

People have been talking a lot about how colors influence behavior. A study published in Science Magazine today added one more entry to the list.

• Red: improves performance on detail-oriented tasks
• Blue: stimulates creativy

The article goes on to discuss underlying causes. Stressful colors like red might enhance effectiveness of getting things done. Blue "calm" colors are better for coming up with that brilliant idea.

Regardless of whether these type of studies are right or not: picking a color scheme for your company look and feel (and/or your PowerPoint presentation) is a far more important decision than deciding the graphics of your logo.

Using historical paintings as an inspiration for color schemes

Great painters use colors to set the emotion of a painting. An example is Van Gogh's "Le Cafe de Nuit". He talks about this painting in one of his letters to his brother Theo:

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

It is interesting that Van Gogh talks about clashing colors, but the end result is in fact a very harmonious ensemble of colors.

Painters use intuition and a sharp eye for real-life images to create a suitable color scheme. You can "borrow" a bit of their genius by using painting as an input source for tools such as kuler to create your own color combinations. In fact, paintings might be a better source than images for this purpose.

The result is good, but not as perfect as the original. I miss the digital equivalent of the artist color pallete to mix and match colors as you go. I am starting to experiment though with going "off color scheme", injecting here and there colors in slides that do not fit 100% with the defined presentation colors.

Great book "Tasteful Color Combinations" - not even available on Amazon

Found hidden away on a shelf in the book shop of the Tel Aviv Museum: "Tasteful Color Combinations" by Naomi Kuno. It is not even available on Amazon, that's why I have trouble finding a good web link to it.

The book contains 455 color schemes (with detailed RGB  and CMYK codes), organized in 14 chapters each with a different mood. ("Nostalgic and melanchology", "humanistic and natural" to name two). The first edition was published in Japan in 2004, and the English translation is not always perfect, adding to the charm of the book.

Some examples of colors schemes available (exact quotations from the book):

• 241, Formal Kimono: the color of a patterned formal kimono for a married woman
• 255, Homely: the cozy warm color of home where a cheerful laugh is always heard
• 359, Glory and fame: glory and fame never fades away when quality is accompanied. The blue is for glory and the red and gold are for fame.
• 370, Rococo -1: the elegant rococo period colors of Fragonard's paintings and dresses
• 111, Ryugu castle: the color of a town of Ryugu castle in a deep sea, where princess Otohime and beautiful fish are said to inhabit, in a legend story of Japanese fantasy.

The colors of 111 below as an example:

I have used this book a number of times as a source of inspiration for finding color schemes for seed-level technology startups that need help developing their very first fund raising presentation. (Other techinques to find a good color scheme can be found here).

Here are the full details of the book in case you would like to try to order it:

Tasteful Color Combinations by Naome Kuno and FORMS Inc. / Color Intelligence Institute Published by Page One Publishing Private Limited, Singapore ISBN 978-981-245-228-3

Color mismatches in corporate PowerPoint templates ("Skype" example)

Skype has a beautiful and very strong visual identity. Things start OK on the first page of this presentation by its COO at CES 2009. Then the color coordination gets weaker. Off blue. Pink's too bright. No greens (Skype's green "call" button is very strong visual icon returning in the monochrone rainbow).

PowerPoint templates go beyond page 1.

I am sure Skype's template is OK, the default colors are probably not set in such a way that they are easy to use for people without a degree (or passion) in graphics design. Like in almost all corporate PowerPoint templates, too much screen real estate is devoted to the brand/logo. With its strong blue colors Skype could actually afford not having a logo at all on its presentation pages. People will recognize the company regardless.

Skype COO Scott Durchslag at CES 2009

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ces skype)

How to set a non-standard color in PowerPoint - HSL codes

You can fill books about color theory, here I will take things one step at a time. How to set a non-standard color in PowerPoint?

First of all to enter the right menu: hit any fill, outline or font color drop-down and select "more colors". A big rainbow-like display will open. (Click the image above for a larger picture.) You have 3 options:

1. Manually move the mouse in the color grid and click a color: this is never accurate enough. (Tip, you can actually stretch the window to make your selection more precise)
2. Use RGB codes: a value of 0-255 for (R)ed, (G)reen, and (B)lue: it is impossible to predict what the resulting color of an RGB-combination is
3. Use HSL codes, my favorite. Let's elaborate.

In the "color model" box at the bottom left of the matrix, change "RGB" to "HSL".

You can define a color exactly by changing the 3 variables, each ranging from 0 to 255:

• (H)ue is the position of the color on the spectrum, going from red all the way to purple
• (S)aturation determines how bold are faded your color will be. Fluorescent colors go for the full 255, pastel colors for a low value, if you make the value really low, all colors turn more or less into grey
• (L)umenance sets the shade of the color, from light to dark

In practice I hardly ever use this technique to set my PowerPoint presentation color scheme (see a previous post on how I do this). There are situations though you might have to use the HSL color model:

• Micro-adjust colors: "a bit more yellow in the orange" (more hue) to fine tune colors. Or to define clashing colors on purpose: create a second colors just a few nodges away from the original on the hue spectrum.
• Create color shades: I use lumenance a lot, it gives an almost endless array of color shadings that I can use in my designs. PowerPoint 2007 gives a standard spectrum of shadings in its default color menu, but if you run out, you can manually adjust the lumenance to get an even larger amount of colors to work with.

• Toning down light, bright colors. Highly saturated colors do not look good when you increase the lumenance. To have beautiful light shadings of these colors you need to take down the saturation.

There are more font colors than black

When working on a white background:

Using very dark shadings of one of your color scheme colors as the standard font color, can give your slides a much nicer feel than using high contrast but boring black. 

Especially true for title lines.

Putting a color overlay on an image in PowerPoint

Often, the colors of images do not fit the color scheme of a presentation. One solution to this is to "take out the colors" of the image and replace it with a monochrome overlay with the most important color of your color scheme. As an example I have added some nice blue to my title page picture. How to do it (PowerPoint 2007):

• Select the image
• Click the "format" menu in the top menu bar
• In the "adjust" ribbon, pick the "recolor" drop down
• Pick one of the suggested colors ("light variations" work best), or hard-key a RGB color code from you color schema in the more variations/more colors box

This technique works particularly well with noisy images full of colors, or pages that contain a lot of logos with irregular colors. Not as elaborate as Adobe Photoshop, but sufficient for most situations.

Avoid pompous templates - colors do the work

Many PowerPoint templates waste a huge amount of screen real estate with big logos and/or graphics. I prefer the opposite approach. Through the consistent use of the template colors on the slide, the audience will immediately recognize the corporate identity of the presenter. As an example, a slide that I use in my own introduction presentation:

Finding a beautiful PowerPoint color scheme

Nothing determines the look and feel of a presentation more than its colors. Not all colors go well together. A matter of personal taste, but there is also hard science. How to find a color scheme that suits your situation?

• From an image. Good images have a natural harmony of colors. There are great online tools that allow you to upload an image and extract colors from it (kuler, colr, etc.). This image could then feature prominently on the title page of your presentation.
  
  
• From a corporate logo. Many companies have not installed PowerPoint templates with the proper corporate colors. Take a hi-res image of your company's logo and subject it to a similar process as you would do with an image.
  
  
• From a color you like. Pick one color you like/is appropriate and let a tool generate matching colors automatically. For example, move the slider in the color wheel in kuler.

Once you extracted the desired colors, write down their "RGB" codes and enter them as a color template in PowerPoint.

For example, for my own web site I was inspired by the fresh colors of an apple and generous amounts of water.

The resulting color scheme can be viewed here.