SlideMagic Blog

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

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.

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).

1. Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)
2. Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).
3. 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.

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”.

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.

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…

Wassily Kandinsky. Church in Murnau. 1910. Oil on cardboard. 64.7 x 50.2 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany

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.

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.

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).

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:

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.

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.