SlideMagic Blog

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 ®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:

A nice presentation by cartoonist Betsy Streeter on the front page of SlideShare today:

Ten Great Uses for a Pencil

Two “so whats” for me:

1. Go back to the pencil when designing presentations. Sketch, erase, sketch, sketch again. A much better creative tool than opening the PowerPoint standard template. Design your slide offline, PowerPoint is a production tool to get your original idea in digital form. Nothing more.
2. A bit of self-relativation: it is amusing to see how professional presentation designers (ME INCLUDED) increasingly resort to using “back to analogue” techqniques to make their point. We’ve come full circle when we start pasting 10MB high-res scans of a piece of paper, a sticky note, etc. into PowerPoint.  Why not bring the physical flip chart page to the presentation event and leave the laptop in the office? This reminds me a little bit of the joke of the investment banker who worked 100 hour work weeks to retire at 45 and settle in a Mediterranean village to spend the day fishing. His fellow local fisher man has been doing this since he was 15 without going through the trouble. (A better, longer version of the joke here).

Presentations are all about brain-to-brain transfer:

1. Idea in presenter’s brain
2. Idea transferred in presentation
3. Idea in audience brain (hopefully)

Japanese scientists are working on the shortcut: extracting images directly from someone’s brain(!).

There are some ambitious objectives for future research:

• Read someone’s dreams
• Read someone’s thoughts
• And: “read [someone’s] feelings and complicated emotional states”

Until now, it has been very difficult to transfer feelings and complicated emotional states in a PowerPoint presentation. You had to resort to writing a novel for that…

Via Pink Tentacle

Complex, custom fonts can be beautiful. Seth Godin even recommends everyone to buy their own as one of his 9 steps to PowerPoint magic.

One problem, custom fonts are a disaster when used on a machine that is not yours. And you discover it when you click through slide 2 of your presentation in front of  a live audience…

Therefore, I won’t use them as my default font in a presentation, but only in specific pages. Here is the trick:

• Make a copy of the original (editable) slide and put it in the back of the deck, you don’t wont to lose the original
• Group all elements of the original slide into one object
• Cut it (CTRL-X)
• Paste special as “PNG”

The whole slide has been transformed into an image which for sure will show up correctly on whatever computer you are using.

UPDATE: POWERPOINT NINJA SHOWS A MUCH BETTER SOLUTION. HOW TO EMBED CUSTOM FONTS IN POWERPOINT: LINK

Background image purchased on iStockPhoto. Font used is Palace Script MT, built into PowerPoint 2007.

I am more and more fascinated by design lessons from consumer advertising billboards. Take this ad for Tango (a UK soft drink):

First of all the message. Confident, huge font, but the reader will discount the message completely “yeah right”. But it makes you think.

Then the typography. It almost hurts. Like watching a broken television screen. The onset of a migraine aura. Looking through the corner of your glasses and see how the lenses distort colors because of light refraction.

I argued before that slightly irritating the senses of your audience can help get your message across.

How did the typographer (Chris Chapman) do it? Clashing colors. Full orange background. Bright red shading. Colors that are very close on the color spectrum, but not similar. Like hitting 2 adjacent keys on a piano (harmonic dissonance). Grunch letter fill (hard to imitate in PowerPoint).

More on working with color wheels in a later post.

Via Ads of the world.

UPDATE after a comment. People should not misunderstand me. Any dissonance effect should serve a purpose. Simply screaming out a message does not make it stick. However, certain “painful” situations can be supported by a (one) “painful” chart.

I found this great Lego ad yesterday on SlipperyBrick:

Sometimes relying on audience imagination can work, sometimes it does not.

1. Sometimes it can work. Although adults might lose some of their imagination capabilities over time, it is still possible to get across visual messages with very simple graphics. Simple shapes, simple cartoons, even just creative typography. The mind will fill in the missing pieces
2. Sometimes it does not work. The book Made to Stick introduces the concept of Curse of Knowledge. The presenter “hears”/imagines a tune in his head and taps it with his fingers on the table. All is perfectly clear to the presenter. All the audience can hear is… someone tapping.

McKinsey and other management consultants love 2x2 matrices (and obviously 3x3s). Personally, I think they are often overused (framework overload).

Not every categorization can be crammed into this framework.

• The axes need to be logical
• The groups needs to lead to 4 categories, i.e., leaving one or two boxes as “not applicable” does not make sense
• They work particularly well when you want to show things moving from one category to the other
• They are good to show that something stands out (from for example the competition) by popping up in the top-right corner

Here are some other techniques to group items on a PowerPoint slide using line and venn diagrams:

• Diagram 2 - “you cannot have it both ways”
• Diagram 3 - “the best of both worlds”

Creating PowerPoint presentations is all about design.

The COLORBURNED blog author shared the content of his RSS reader in this post with a list of 127 RSS feeds “that all designers should subscribe to” (the comments add a few more).

Not sure whether I will do that, but it does provide some good weekend reading.

Putting a summary slide as page 1 in your PowerPoint presentation is tricky.

• A diluted and boring summary might turn the audience off (“let’s check email on my phone”)
• A summary chart might “give away the point” of your presentation too early
• Some presenters might get stuck on page one and tell the whole story without using any other slides (sometimes this can be a good thing, a presentation with PowerPoint)

A good page one is a slide that gives the audience some clue about what’s going to happen and presents an interesting teaser about what is to come.

Now that I come to think of it - a good summary chart is like a good headline

The following image (purchased from iStockPhoto) adds another possibility to presentation opening concepts I discussed before (here, here, and here). “Let’s fast forward to the end before diving in”. Shrink the image to one side of the screen and add your teaser in big-font-text

There are many ways to spell monetary amounts. Pick one and use it consistently throughout your PowerPoint presentation:

• $, US$, USD, I actually like these 3-letter abbreviations, no searching on keyboards, no need to search and insert symbols, every currency has one that looks consistent
• Billion, bn
• Million, M, m
• 000, thousand, k
• Decimal point, decimal comma
• Thousand separator point, comma, or none
• Negative number with “-”, or in between brackets

Unfortunately, detail does matter in presentation design…