Good and Bad Color Combinations for PowerPoint

PowerPoint can be an extremely effective way to communicate with an audience. Using visuals to support what you are discussing can increase attendees' attention and their retention of what you are presenting. However, a poorly designed PowerPoint presentation can not only make you look unprofessional but also make it harder for your audience to concentrate on the information that you are presenting. Choosing appropriate colors can make your presentation more effective.

One of the worst things that you can do in a PowerPoint presentation is to mix "warm" and "cool" colors. Warm colors are colors that are more on the red end of the spectrum, such as red, orange and yellow. Cool colors are colors that fall towards the blue end of the spectrum, such as green and blue. Placing blue or green text on a red background, or vice versa, not only looks unprofessional but is very unattractive.

Between 5 to 8 percent of men have some degree of color blindness. If you mix, for instance, greens and reds that are the same brightness, a person who is colorblind will be unable to distinguish between the two colors. To avoid this problem, try to mix colors that have different brightness levels. For example, instead of using blue text with a purple background, use light blue on a dark purple background. That way, even if your viewers cannot see the colors, they will see the differences in brightness. Designing with contrast is important, not only for color blind audience members but also for everyone else. Higher contrast presentations are simply easier to see. They also project much better if your projector gets washed out due to competing ambient light.

When you choose colors to mix, try to blend analogous colors. A color wheel displays six main colors -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple with an intermediate shade between them. If you blend orange with reddish orange and yellowish orange, your presentations will have a harmonious and smooth appearance. Lime green, forest green and turquoise also go well together. If you follow this strategy, the color differences will be strong enough to be visible but not jarring. Mixing complementary colors, such as red and green, together can give your presentation a more dynamic appearance, but doing this can also make your presentation visually jarring and unattractive. It is a technique that is best used sparingly.

One excellent shortcut to coming up with a color scheme is to use the themes that are built into PowerPoint. These themes are professionally designed to work well on screen and to have an appropriate appearance. Some are very dynamic, while others are conservative, so you should be able to find one to match the look and feel that you desire for your presentation.