Other examples of interfering colors are on the border of pink and blue, or green and blue. I blogged earlier about how great classical painters manage to create rich colors through a combination of color mixing, patterns, texture.
Showing posts with label Colors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colors. Show all posts
Screaming colors
Other examples of interfering colors are on the border of pink and blue, or green and blue. I blogged earlier about how great classical painters manage to create rich colors through a combination of color mixing, patterns, texture.
Make the small print really small
On the first day of my career at McKinsey we were told to put the sources of our analysis really prominently at the bottom of each chart. Even if the source of the data was yourself, simply put "Team analysis".
Still, many presentation slides have very conspicous sources and foot notes at the bottom. It is a typographical eye sore. When you are standing up to present your slides, people are not interested in reading the small print.
I am not advocating to take the foot notes of all together. Readers who go through the deck afterwards might be interested in them. It is also very hard to keep a good book keeping of data sources, better to have them handy all the time (I do not have the discipline to keep on updating that page with all the sources in the back of the document). And finally, taking of the reference to a photographer in an image with a creative commons license is not good practice.
So instead, do the obvious. Make the font really small (you can overwrite the "8" as smallest font size in the PowerPoint drop-down menu and make it a 6). And give the font a color with low contrast with the background. In that way, you get the best of both worlds.
This might also be the way to handle your lawyer who insists to put “confidential” and other disclaimers on every slide of the deck. Page numbers can be treated the same way. Sometimes they need to be there, but only for people who stand with their nose against the screen.
Still, many presentation slides have very conspicous sources and foot notes at the bottom. It is a typographical eye sore. When you are standing up to present your slides, people are not interested in reading the small print.
I am not advocating to take the foot notes of all together. Readers who go through the deck afterwards might be interested in them. It is also very hard to keep a good book keeping of data sources, better to have them handy all the time (I do not have the discipline to keep on updating that page with all the sources in the back of the document). And finally, taking of the reference to a photographer in an image with a creative commons license is not good practice.
So instead, do the obvious. Make the font really small (you can overwrite the "8" as smallest font size in the PowerPoint drop-down menu and make it a 6). And give the font a color with low contrast with the background. In that way, you get the best of both worlds.
This might also be the way to handle your lawyer who insists to put “confidential” and other disclaimers on every slide of the deck. Page numbers can be treated the same way. Sometimes they need to be there, but only for people who stand with their nose against the screen.
Color theory can be boring
Nature or artists usually do not stick to color theory to create an interesting color scheme. Jazz bands really start to swing when the drummer goes slightly off beat. If you restrict yourself to complementary colors, your choices are limited and the look of your presentation resembles those of many others who use the same approach.
Instead, get inspired by art (try Art Authority) or a or a colorful sea creature, or a photograph (check out Steve McCurry's blog) and upload the image to a color extraction tool such as Adobe Kuler. It will make you work more original, plus it adds a little personal secret to your presentation, your favorite painter or that memorable place that is hidden in the slides somewhere.
Instead, get inspired by art (try Art Authority) or a or a colorful sea creature, or a photograph (check out Steve McCurry's blog) and upload the image to a color extraction tool such as Adobe Kuler. It will make you work more original, plus it adds a little personal secret to your presentation, your favorite painter or that memorable place that is hidden in the slides somewhere.
Dark or light slide background?
A dark or light background for your presentation slides? Dark backgrounds work better for very large stages, where a big bright screen takes away the attention from the speaker. In smaller meeting rooms, a light background work better.
It is very inconvenient to edit and work with 2 masters of the same presentation, it is a lot of work and you always end up with inconsistencies. Presentations with a dark background give less flexibility to work with colors, and are harder to print (there are still audiences that do this, especially when presenting to institutional investors).
So as a result, I recommend sticking to a light background for most business presentations, unless you have a very specific, high-profile event that merits the design of a custom slide deck.
It is very inconvenient to edit and work with 2 masters of the same presentation, it is a lot of work and you always end up with inconsistencies. Presentations with a dark background give less flexibility to work with colors, and are harder to print (there are still audiences that do this, especially when presenting to institutional investors).
So as a result, I recommend sticking to a light background for most business presentations, unless you have a very specific, high-profile event that merits the design of a custom slide deck.
Monet, poppies, and color rhythm
Nature and artists are still better at producing certain colors than computers. Look at the famous painting Poppies at Argenteuil by Monet. If you were the pick the blue green color and copy the RGB values into your PowerPoint presentation, the result would be dull. The rhythm of the brush strokes adds something.
In spring, there are many flower fields like these in Israel. The green blue color is created by the contrast between the top and the bottom of the leaves: grey green and yellow green. The wind moving the leaves creates the color effect. In an earlier post I discussed a painting by Jan van Eyck with a similar effect of alternating and interacting colors.
This painting is also a great example of how to create movement in a static image. The horizon and the diagonal line between the two ladies set the composition. Look how the red flowers are blurry dots of paint without much detail, and how they get incredibly big close to the front. Flowers in the wind never sit still, but rather we watch them go round, leaving a much bigger impression than the space they actually occupy.
This painting has multiple levels of experience, an almost impossible feature to recreate in a PowerPoint slide, but a reminder about what visuals ultimately are: pieces of emotional input. First you see a landscape, then you see things moving in the wind, hear the wind whistling, feel that spring sensation when you venture out of your cold house into the sun and sense your skin warming up from the outside. The bright red, blue green contrast, plus the movements of the children running down the hill might just remind you that life is all about those simple pleasures and moments of beauty.
In spring, there are many flower fields like these in Israel. The green blue color is created by the contrast between the top and the bottom of the leaves: grey green and yellow green. The wind moving the leaves creates the color effect. In an earlier post I discussed a painting by Jan van Eyck with a similar effect of alternating and interacting colors.
This painting is also a great example of how to create movement in a static image. The horizon and the diagonal line between the two ladies set the composition. Look how the red flowers are blurry dots of paint without much detail, and how they get incredibly big close to the front. Flowers in the wind never sit still, but rather we watch them go round, leaving a much bigger impression than the space they actually occupy.
This painting has multiple levels of experience, an almost impossible feature to recreate in a PowerPoint slide, but a reminder about what visuals ultimately are: pieces of emotional input. First you see a landscape, then you see things moving in the wind, hear the wind whistling, feel that spring sensation when you venture out of your cold house into the sun and sense your skin warming up from the outside. The bright red, blue green contrast, plus the movements of the children running down the hill might just remind you that life is all about those simple pleasures and moments of beauty.
Color management in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac
Slowly I am working around some of the shortcomings that PowerPoint 2011 for Mac has in comparison to PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, and get to enjoy some of the advantages of the Mac platform. One of them is color management.
Built-in to a Mac is a powerful color management picker:
Built-in to a Mac is a powerful color management picker:
- With a magnifying glass, you can copy the color of any element on screen and add it as a color to your palette. For example, you can take the colors from your corporate logo to create a matching PowerPoint color scheme. In Windows, I had to rely on other applications (Photoshop, Paint) to do this.
- Your color palettes are stored across applications, so you set them in PowerPoint, they are available in Photoshop, Keynote, and any other applications you are using.
See this extensive post on robinwood.com on how to use the Mac color picking tool. Thank you Andrew Marritt for pointing me to this.
What really matters in PowerPoint template design
The design of the template should be simple: minimal graphics and logos, maximum screen space (see a previous post here). My favorite is really simple: a nicely designed title page followed by a completely white page for the rest of the deck.
So what does matter? The technical PowerPoint stuff that helps thousands of employees with only a very basic understanding of PowerPoint do the right thing. Before letting the genie out of the bottle and releasing a new template to the whole organization check the following:
So what does matter? The technical PowerPoint stuff that helps thousands of employees with only a very basic understanding of PowerPoint do the right thing. Before letting the genie out of the bottle and releasing a new template to the whole organization check the following:
- Are the RGB codes of the color scheme coded correctly as standard colors? In 99% of all templates I see, PowerPoint offers the default blue, green, red color options when drawing a shape in a template. Easy to fix.
- Are the drawing guides set up correctly so that people align objects correctly on the page? There should be guides that align with screen graphics, and guides that help users position objects on the screen. (Earlier post here)
- Does the standard blank page pop up correctly when hitting "insert new slide"? Most templates are a bunch of example charts that people can use for inspiration. Nobody uses them, every one clicks "insert new slide" and - if not corrected - gets served the standard Microsoft chart with a big title and a hierarchy of bullets in Calibri font. To fix this, go into view slide master, delete most of the template charts on the left side of the screen and carefully re-design the key blank slide with the correct graphics, colors, and fonts. If you have courage, delete the standard bullet page.
- Are the standard shapes set correctly? Draw a text box, set the font, right click it and set as default shape. Repeat for a shape (rectangle, anything) and focus on the color, the font, the outline, the shadow, etc. Right click and set as standard shape.
- Are custom fonts embedded in the file? (PowerPoint Ninja post)
- Are the page-filling images in title pages and separator pages compressed? If not, a presentation of 2 pages can already take up 5MB in hard disk space. Go into the slide master, select the image, and compress image sizes.
- Are the data charts formats set up correctly? This is a bit more advanced but should really pay off. See an earlier post on fixing issues.
The best way to test all this is to distribute the template to handful of people and test before releasing it to the entire company.
Setting the colors for Excel 2003 users
Increasingly, I use color schemes in Excel models as well. While I am about to switch to Microsoft Office 2010, I find that the majority of my clients (especially the large corporate ones) are still on Office 2003. Buried down in the Excel menus is a feature to set the colors that Excel 2003 users will see when they open files created in Excel 2007.
- Click the office button
- Go to the bottom and select "Excel options"
- Select "save"
- Click the "colors" button under "preserve visual appearance of the workbook"
Out with the shape outline
Tel Aviv uses a very dominant street painting scheme: red-white and you cannot park, blue-white and you can park but have to pay. The colors are so bright that the city looks like one big Formula One circuit. Why not use more modest colors? Grey blue and olive green? The picture below gives an example, freshly painted pavements (you have to re-paint often in the sunny climate here).
The same is true for PowerPoint shapes. Whenever I can, I omit the lines around shapes (shape outlines). It makes your chart a lot calmer.
Image credit: Flickmor
Colors mean different things in different cultures
A nice diagram on the blog Information is Beautiful (original post). Something to take into account when picking your next color template. click the image for a larger picture.
Lighter shades for bright colors
PowerPoint 2010 gives you the option of a spectrum of different shades of the same color. This is great to design charts with a consistent color scheme.
However, if your template contains colors that are highly saturated, the suggested lighter shades of your color will be too bright to use as neutral color nuances. Here is how you can fix it. (Click on the image for a larger picture.).
- Create a new base color by reducing the saturation (in laymen's speak: make it more grey).
- Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)
- Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).
- Reduce the (S)aturation value, while keeping all other variables the same.
- Use a lighter shade of this new base color instead and save this as a new color in your color template.
If you are interested in learning more about color theory, you can browse through some earlier posts on the subject of color or go straight to this one.
The color orange - since 1512
While reading Chris Brogan's latest book Trust Agents
, I came across this interesting factoid: until only very recently there was no word for the color "orange" in Western European languages. Chris claims that it is the main reason why we talk about "red heads" or "goldfish".
, I came across this interesting factoid: until only very recently there was no word for the color "orange" in Western European languages. Chris claims that it is the main reason why we talk about "red heads" or "goldfish".
Research on Wikipedia provides more background:
The colour is named after the orange fruit, introduced to Europe via the Sanskrit word nāranja. Before this was introduced to the English-speaking world, the colour was referred to (in Old English) as geoluhread, which translates into Modern English as yellow-red. The first recorded use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1512, in the court of King Henry VIII.
Da, da, da, it's OK to let go of the rules of design (sometimes)
Color theory provides us with a clear set of rules of colors that go well together. Kuler has them even built in: complementary colors, triad, monochromatic, etc. But hey the world would be boring if everyone would follow the rules.
Look at the world of music for example. Jazz drummers only really start to swing when they go slightly off-beat. Many R&B songs have their drum computers programmed with delayed beats, providing a punch a fraction of a second too late.
If not, the music would sound like a 1980s Casio keyboard.
In my presentation work I recently stopped using these color composition rules. Instead I often look at a beautiful image or a powerful painting to design the color scheme of my presentation. Find a painting that provokes an emotion, load it up in kuler, and use it as the basis for the colors of your next presentation, even if it does not exactly follow the rules of color composition..
Richer color textures for presentation design?
Colors for computer screens and printers are created by mixing primary colors. (See this background article about RGB (adding primary colors for screens) and CMYK (filtering primary colors for printers).
In theory, it is possible to create any color you want using the right RGB codes (more about the color wheel here). Still, I find it almost impossible to recreate the colors that some of the great painters are using in their paintings. Obviously they did not use tools such as kuler, but rather relied on mixing colors on a palate by hand.
Take this painting as an example: The Arnolfini Portait by Dutch painter Jan van Eyck, painted in 1434. It has unbelievable light effects and color textures. (Huge image here). How to recreate this fabulous green (some think symbolizing the hope of starting a healthy family) in PowerPoint?
Kuler does not do a good job, see the color codes below.
Zooming into the dress gives some clues about the answer. Van Eyck added bits of yellow and paint texture effects to give the dress a warm velvety appearance.
In the early days, PowerPoint had a rich set of patterns to fill objects with grey shadings. Based on this principle, and with increased computing power it should be possible to offer much more complex color textures to the presentation designer as well. Textures that go beyond the "plasticy", shiny, and glass-like surfaces that are available now.
Frans Hals: 27 shades of black
It is thought that Vincent van Gogh once admired the Dutch painter Frans Hals (1580-1666) for using 27 shades of black in one painting. If you study the works of the Dutch masters carefully, you can see that they actually do use very little color. (Here is an example from Rembrandt: black, red, yellow) Part of this is due to space limitations on the color palette. Pink skin tones take a lot of space, leaving not much room for other colors.
Painting above: Frans Hals, The regentesses of the Old Men's Home in Haarlem, 1664, Oil on canvas, 170.5 x 249.5 cm
There is a similarity to designing presentation slides here. You use shades and tints of the same color to create a calm background visual, while directing the eye of the viewer with bright highlight colors to the important information on the slide.
The color goes in last
Garr Reynolds wrote a beautiful post on what Zen arts can teach us about minimal use of color. Let's take things down to the very practical level: how to use these concepts when sitting behind your slideware edit screen.
- Make sure your template has a decent color scheme that works well with your corporate colors. See one of my earlier post how to set one up.
- Design your charts in black and white. Really, switch off the colors, and give it your best shot using only shades of grey. This is especially useful when working on busy data charts or complex IT architecture diagrams.
- Now start adding additional background colors from the template to group items together that belong to each other. A cluster of servers, all pieces of a pie chart that relate to manufacturing businesses, etc. Within each background color, again use shadings as if you were working in black and white. A very light orange database server, with a slightly darker orange data pipe coming in, and label it "data base server" with an almost brown orange font.
- Finally add very bright accent colors to highlight aspects of the chart. The server with breached security that is letting all kind of viruses into the network definitely deserves a dash of red.
The key lesson: the color goes in last (if at all).
Neat source of color schemes: Color + Design blog
The Color + Design blog provides a constant stream of color schemes based on images, posters, fabrics, street art, to name a few. Add it to your RSS reader if you need color inspiration. One color scheme from today's post:
ColoRotate - new color design tool
Your colors scheme is the most important driver of your presentation's look and feel. Much more important than logos or other graphical elements on the page. Adobe's kuler is a popular example of an online tool that helps you pick colors (even from an image if you want to) and define a nice matching color scheme.
I have played around with the tool a little bit and like it, but it requires a bit of studying and practice before you get the hang of playing with the 3D axes and their impact. This tool is likely to appeal most to graphical professionals.
Recently, ColoRotate has been released. ColoRotate uses a 3 dimensional approach to picking colors wich it claims is closer to the natural way the brain processes colors. It relies less on the sliders that are common in kuler and other tools. Color schemes you create can be shared in an online community, similar to kuler.
I have played around with the tool a little bit and like it, but it requires a bit of studying and practice before you get the hang of playing with the 3D axes and their impact. This tool is likely to appeal most to graphical professionals.
Having said that, the web site contains a good introduction article to the art and science behind picking beautiful color schemes.
Google image search narrowed down by image color
An interesting find by the Google Operating System blog: using Google image search to find pictures with a certain color. It is not an official search option (yet), you need to adjust the Google URL manually:
Finding red birds:
- Enter "bird" in Google image search
- Add "&imgcolor=red" to the Google URL so it looks like this: http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red,
- Replace "red" with "blue", "green", "teal", "purple", "yellow", "orange", "pink", "white", "gray", "black" and "brown" to get other colors
Still, watch out for possible copy right violations or poor image quality when using pictures taken from Google in your PowerPoint presentations.
Thank you Ashish for pointing this out to me.
New startup - do you still need to bother with a logo?
I encounter this situation often when designing fund raising presentations for new startups pitching to VCs. "Oops, what about our logo?". My answer is usually don't bother, instead invest time to find a suitable color scheme.- Getting a good logo designed is expensive
- It takes time for logos to become brand icons. First you need a brand story/experience, only then can customers connect it with your symbol. Read Seth Godin's post (great quote "the iPod didn't need a logo").
- Logos are not important for the look and feel of a presentation, colors are. If a client insist, I will put them in 8pt at the right bottom of the page. Think about what drove logo design in the last century: they needed to fit on a building, a letter head, a form, a black and white fax. Because the user could not manipulate colors, fonts, images like we can today, it was the only "interesting" graphic on an otherwise boring piece of paper without an identity. These times are over.
Forget about logos if you are short of time, or short of cash. Pick some nice colors instead. Worry about your logo later.
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