Hey guys, Payman here.
Part 2 of the 3 part series of How to Create Compelling Presentations.
In the last episode, I talked about what you need to do before you create your presentations.
That was referring to brainstorming, defining your audience, the medium and also how to
create an outline.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to choose the right color for your presentation.
And to understand colors and also how to apply them to your presentations.
And we’ll talk very briefly about how to develop your theme.
Okay?
So let’s get started.
When I talk about colors, I’ll very briefly talk about the color wheel.
Because that’s going to allow me to show you the basics of color.
Now, when I form the color wheel, we have red and we have blue and we have yellow.
And by combining equal parts of these, you’re able to form your secondary colors.
These are your primary colors because all colors need to be combined in order to create
additional colors.
So these are necessary colors that you need.
Your secondary colors, what you do is you take equal parts, you combine them and you
end up with your secondary colors.
Such as your red and your blue and then you end up with violet.
And then we have a little bit of a gap left.
And to fill that gap, we want to combine a primary and a secondary color.
So we take the red and we take the violet and when we combine them together, we’ll end up
with a red-violet color and so forth.
So that’s actually filling up our color wheel.
Now, in terms of colors, I’ll go a little
bit deeper into that but first, I’m going to talk to you a little bit about developing
your theme.
Because themes are very important, an integral part of where colors come into play.
So what you don’t want to end up with is the type of presentation I'm going to show you in a second,
that is commonly used as your typical presentation template where people just combine different
colors and text together and then end up with something like this.
What you really want to do is to create presentations from a color, a theme aspect and even the
content that actually emotionally connect with your audience.
Something such as this.
So it’s subtle, it’s warm and it’s clean and that’s what we're going to talk about
in the next episode: how to create slides such as this one.
Now, let’s go back a little bit to the colors.
How to choose a right color scheme.
Now, colors trigger different emotions.
And so selection of the colors actually is something that you want to give a little bit
of thought of.
Who is your target audience?
What is the purpose of their presentation?
And so forth.
So let’s do just a very quick experiment here.
These are a bunch of different color buckets.
And so we have the beige.
The beige color exudes a calming effect and it’s pretty much very often used in modern
technology designs.
Now, additionally the blues.
So we have a couple different types of blues.
You look at the light blue, that’s kind of like Twitter, your social network.
And then we have the darker one, your Facebook, is very common on social media.
Additionally, blue basically exudes a kind of a loyalty and a calming effect.
Now additionally, we’re talking about orange, Orange actually is seen as an energetic, playful color
and exudes an emotional response from a high-energy perspective.
This slide here is using a couple of different colors and so you have your orange, you have
the blue in the background and then the slide here also has a nice balance of colors.
These are the types of things you want to do.
Now, how to combine colors, let’s talk about that.
There are 3 different ways that you can do that.
And I’ll go from the easiest to the medium and then a little bit more difficult.
What I recommend for the beginners is to stick with monochrome color schemes and perhaps
the second option I’m going to show you.
So, with the monochrome, what you have is one color and you add a little bit of black,
a little bit of white, you end up with a range of colors.
In this case, we have 5 different colors of the same.
So there are different hues of the blue.
And by doing that, it’s very difficult to make mistakes because the colors just are
warm and subtle and actually go with each other.
So if you look at this example here, we’re using the same colors and we even have enough
contrast.
We have a darker blue and we have a lighter blue and so we end up with a text on a very
light blue or even white and going over darker.
So you have nice contrast and also you have a subtle and warm feeling of the color perspective.
The other one you can do is complementary colors.
Complementary colors go back to the color wheel.
With the color wheel, you can draw a line and basically, select opposite colors.
So by selecting opposite colors, they actually complement each other.
And so going with, in this case, the violet and also the yellow, you end up with a slide
such as this.
So the violet is serving as the background, as the main color and the secondary color
here is the yellow.
So it gives you a nice design.
The other option which I don’t really recommend if you’re at a beginner or immediate level is to
use triadic or tetradic colors.
So, with triadic colors, what you’re doing is forming a triangle.
There are 3 different points that you can actually rotate and that allow you to select from 3 different
complementary colors.
With the tetradic, it’s the same thing.
It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, and you can actually rotate the square around and that allows you to select 4 different
colors.
But again, I really recommend you stick the first 2 options unless you’re more advanced
and have a better understanding of the color schemes.
So here’s an example of what we have.
The blue, the yellow and the red.
You would typically think that they don’t go together but it’s actually using complementary
colors as a triad principle.
Now, let’s talk a little bit about how to
choose the ideal color scheme.
It kind of goes back to contrast.
One of the recommendations that I make,
And I did this in the first episode on the Make Information Beautiful Series about contrast.
Contrast is very important and many non designers avoid that.
And what you want to do in this case is we have an orange which is serving as an accent
color and has a high contrast over the grays.
So that kind of works nicely.
Additionally, another design principle is, keep it simple.
Simplicity is key in terms of colors, keep it simple. Choose only 2, 3, maybe 4 colors
maximum.
Again, the monochrome was only one color but different tints of it, so we try to stick to
only a few colors overall.
And additionally, you want to use the 60-30-10 rule.
So with the 60-30-10 rule, what you do is you take 60% of the area of your design, so
let’s say your slide where you have your image and so on, you can put a tint over it and
you apply 60% of your color approximately to that.
That would be your primary color.
And 30% to the secondary and the 10% would be your accent color.
you have a nice balance on the design you’re going to create.
So there you have it.
As far as the colors, let’s talk about content very briefly.
Now, one of the biggest mistakes we talked about in the prior episodes was about
having too much content on your slides.
It’s very common and I see it all the time.
So in this slide, there are 8 different points and they’ve been just compacted into 1 slide.
There’s very little empty space, very little white space and what that does is it prevents
the user from understanding what’s being communicated to them.
There’s no limit to how many slides you should have in a presentation and in total
it has to be 5 to 10 slides.
So there’s nothing wrong with breaking content into snackable, easy-to-digest pieces.
So, for example, that same slide of 8 points has been divided into this and this one.
So two slides, four points each.
And we’re using basically the endpoints of using visual cues with short text and forming
the design here.
You could’ve even gone and actually added additional slides, it doesn’t have to be
a 2-slide presentation, it could have been 4 to 6 slides.
Each point could have its own slide and essence.
So there you have it.
This is the episode 2: How to Choose the Right Colors For Your Presentation.
And I hope that you put these color principles into use.
It’s very important and I highly recommend it before you actually create the content
and the design.
You decide on the color selection that you’re going to have.
In the next episode, we’ll be talking about how to put all the different items that we’ve
learned the last couple episodes together to create a compelling presentation.
I’m going to actually show an example of that.
Thank you, guys.