How to choose the right color palette for your presentations

If you're struggling with choosing colors for your presentations, don't be scared, you're not the only one.

In the old days of using projectors, we didn't really have this problem, but with powerpoint, keynotes or other presentation software available today, there are just unlimited possibilities when it comes to choosing a design and a color scheme. First you have a large palette of colors available, then you also have the option of adding effects like gradients, transparency, etc..

So how do you choose which colors to use in your presentations?

Simple, follow these tips.

1. Less is more

When it comes to design, but even more to colors, remember this: less is more.

Restrain yourself from adding too many colors for the sake of making your design look more sophisticated or pleasant on the eye; you will only achieve the opposite. Too many colors bring clutter!

I would stick to 4 or 5 colors at most: 2 for the text and 2 or 3 for illustrations.

Most people use variations in the color of their text for highlighting certain sections, but it really makes their slides messy. Instead, use bold text if you want to highlight something, but don't change to red or green. Just choose one color for titles and one color for the body.



Same with your illustrations when you add shapes, lines and arrows in your slides, do not overdo it. Keep it simple, limit yourself to 2 or 3 colors.

2. Make sure to be in line with your branding

If you already have a brand with a logo or maybe even a website, then there is no need to reinvent the wheel. The key to good branding is to be consistent with your design, and the easiest way to stay consistent across your marketing material is by using the same color palette everywhere.

So look at your logo, your website, your brochures. Which colors do you have at your disposal? Remember, less is more so keep it simple.

3. Choose the mood you want to give to your presentation

Do you want your presentation to look modern, retro, fun, conservative, corporate, artistic? The combination of colors you select can easily give a specific mood to your presentation. Have a look at the examples below and see for yourself.

4. Select or create your color palette with ColourLovers

COLOURlovers is one of many websites that will help you come up with a pretty color palette. You can browse existing palettes or design your own.

A very easy way to create your own palette and make sure it is harmonious is to create a palette from a photo. This way you can match your color palette to your logo for example.

To illustrate my point, see what color palettes people are extracting from beautiful photos on Pinterest:

Photo credit Shelly Fuehrer

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Photo credit Donna W

5. Customize your powerpoint theme colors

Once you have chosen your colors, customise the theme colors of your presentation template, so that you will easily access them from the color menu of Powerpoint.

To change the theme, under the Design tab, click Colors then click Create new theme colors. Modify the various colors - you can see a live sample of your chosen color combination - then add a new name for this new color palette and save.

I hope this is helpful. There are many more things to discuss about colors and many tools to review, but that will be for another time.

ONE Simple Way To Find the Best SEO Agency

This is a guest post from Tapha. Tapha is the founder of MyAppTemplates.com, a site that provides custom iphone app templates to people who cannot afford to spend $1,000′s on their iphone app design.

 

There's a great article by Bob Hoffman, a veteran ad man and blogger, that highlights what it is that separates the best ad people from everybody else. It's very good. I recommend that you check it out here.

What it says, quite simply, is that the best people, the ones at the top their game, are the ones that seem to NOTICE things better than everybody else.

Here is a passage from the post:

"Then the other night, slithering on hands and knees from the bed to the bathroom, it struck me. There's a much simpler and more satisfying explanation. The attribute that makes people exceptional at advertising is that they're better at noticing things. They're good noticers.

They notice what people really do. They notice what people have in their refrigerators. They notice the little lies that people tell themselves and each other. They notice the contradictions between attitudes and behaviors. They notice the small, seemingly irrelevant things that most people don't notice."

It's a very interesting observation and one that I happen to agree with. The best people, by and large, are the ones that see what other people don't.

This is no more true than for people in SEO. Infact, I'd argue that this trait is even more important to have as an SEO than it is in any other area of online marketing. The SEO space is full of so many moving parts that change constantly, that an enhanced ability to notice things that others may miss is not only an advantage, it's a downright neccessity.


photo credit: Darwin Bell via photo pin cc

So how does this help you to spot the best SEO agency to work with?

The answer is that THEY (the best ones) will have this quality, I'll call it 'good taste'. And it can be spotted.

How to keep your business blog interesting for your readers

Last week I got an email from a friend and she asked me this: "Christelle – we are writing a blog on our company's website and I wondered if you had any tips on how to keep it interesting?"

I was really proud that she was asking me for advice about blogging and felt really compelled and excited to answer her email. So as soon as I got a bit of time, I opened my gmail and started writing a few tips. The email ended up longer than I thought and as I was writing it, I thought to myself: well, actually this would be a perfect story for my blog, my readers can benefit from these tips too. So here we go.

How to keep your blog interesting?

For your business blog, the first thing to do is to think your about blog's objectives. Why are you launching a blog, what are you trying to achieve with it? It will help you make sure that you are writing for the right reasons. I wrote an article on how to define objectives for your website, you can apply the same principles for your blog. 



photo credit: Genista via photo pin cc

Then you need to meet with your colleagues, and list all the types of posts that you can write:

• Case studies


• News


• Upcoming events


• Behind the scene


• People stories


• Tutorials


• Etc..

What Steve Jobs can teach us about fonts

If you never heard the speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University back in 2005, I recommend that you head over to Youtube now and listen to it, it is highly inspiring. There is one particular element of the speech that I want to refer to, which is the story Steve tells about calligraphy. Having dropped off college, he attended a few creative classes and got really interested in the beauty of calligraphy. What didn't seem as an important skill to gain at the time, resulted in a revolutionary way to approach text on computers. He said later: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

[video type="youtube" clip_id="UF8uR6Z6KLc" autohide="0" autoplay="false" controls="true"]

What lessons should you learn from Steve?

Today there are thousands of fonts of all types available and it would be foolish not to pay attention to them. Fonts can instantly change the look and feel of any piece of communication, be it printed or digital. They can instantly transmit a feeling of elegance, grunge, modern, retro, futuristic, comic, you name it... Fonts are just as important as color, composition or photography and should not be left ignored. Too many small businesses keep working with the Arial, Times New Roman or Calibri fonts installed by default, without realizing the opportunity they miss to instantly make their material looking professional with the use of better fonts.

Don't make these 5 mistakes when choosing your design software

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself. " Groucho Marx. << Tweet this

As you probably guessed from reading this post I love Adobe software and I love Photoshop in particular. For the last 5 months, I've been trying to get Photoshop installed on my work machine, but being part of a large corporation I encountered some serious resistance. I won't go in the details of the story, but basically I've been denied Photoshop because of its price and was told to use Paint Shop Pro, a much cheaper alternative with the same functionality - or so they said.

The result is me being frustrated every single time I design something, wasting hours to find workarounds and slowly losing my skills at Photoshop.


photo credit: kevin dooley via photo pin cc

So here are some lessons for you to take, don't do these 5 mistakes:

1. Looking only at the price

Sure, good software is expensive, but there might a good reason for this and it's always good to remember that there are hidden costs associated with using your software. If the tool is not well designed or you work slowly with it, then it is extra time that you spend on it, and we all know that time is valuable.