“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.
Colors meaning
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From the course by National Research Tomsk State University
Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides
150 ratings
National Research Tomsk State University
150 ratings
Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery
From the lesson
Part 2: Templates and colors meaning
This week is about templates, colors and fonts. What's wrong with most templates? Which page decorations should you use to make your slide look beautiful? (None!) What information can we pass through the colors? How to choose a typeface? Does a proper typeface make all the difference? (Yes, it does).
Meet the Instructors
Alexei KapterevLomonosov MSU BS
Colors, colors are important and if you work for
an organization, this is not something you should be making a choice about.
All you need to do is you to open your style guide, which your
organization should have and you just need to use and appropriate color.
And in that case, if this is your situation,
all you need to know to understand I think are the meaning behind those colors.
I think you need to be conscience in your communication.
I think you have to understand exactly what you are saying with this or
that color.
But if you are trying to setup a new organization or
if you are working as an independent person,
you probably need to create a style guide.
And in order to create the color part of the style guide, you need to select your
primary color and then create a palette using a color matching tool.
I think you probably know that certain colors match and certain colors,
well don't.
But I don't think you need to understand all those intricate things about
the magic of color matching.
All you need to do is to use some simple like this one for
example colorexplorer.com.
There's plenty of them on the Internet this is just the one I like.
If you Google color matching tool it will come up with hundreds of those.
All we need to do, you input your primary color and
then draw on a number of algorithms and you choose the one you like.
Actually you need to just scroll through all of them and just try different
combinations and to see what works or what doesn't and all those pallets you can get
by just inputting the basic midnight blue.
However, you do need to come up with this basic midnight blue.
You need to choose your primary color, you need to choose a color to start from.
And this primary color should be the color communicating your
personal organization brand character.
And the question here is what is that that you're trying to communicate?
Are you trying to come up as bold, aggressive or friendly, and honest?
Are you trying to be risky or stable, ect, etc.
Colors can communicate those kinds of things.
Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge that all of my
thinking about colors was influenced by William Lidwell.
And let me use this opportunity to recommend a wonderful book of his
called Universal Principles of Design.
He teaches at the University of Houston, I think.
So things I think you should need to know about color.
Colors have general and context-specific meanings.
I will explain in a moment what that means.
Context meanings mostly overpower general meanings.
Thing number 3, shades of colors have their own
separate meanings which might overpower general meanings.
And finally the general meanings conform to a certain logic which
is I think the hardest and the most surprising thing of all.
Let me explain what I mean.
We all know that color works.
We all know that color means something and it influences people.
We all know that this stop sign is not as effective as this stop sign.
This stop sign has much more stopping power if you will,
as opposed to colorless version.
So, generally red means stop.
Nobody needs to explain this to anybody, we all kind of get this, unconsciously.
So the question is, if red means danger,
if red means stop, why does McDonald's have a red logo?
And the answer would be, well, in context of food, red doesn't mean stop.
There's plenty of edible things which are red.
We know that as far as food is concerned, red means safe.
Quite unlike blue, for example.
Blue generally means spoiled.
So also, if you look at the competitive contents,
if you will, those people compete on visibility, right?
The choices people make, well there fast food restaurants are not,
we don't sit and deliberate whether I should go there or there.
Its who's more visible.
If you see those bright, big, red or yellow probably signs,
chances are you'll go to the first joint you will see.
So it works for sort of practical purposes.
Yes, red means danger, but it's also very visible.
And in that case, visibility is more important than perceived dangerousness.
However, the problem arises when people start to think well,
you know what I've heard somewhere that fast food is bad for you.
And in that case, this danger brand and
McDonald's brand, they kind of collide.
This is where McDonald's brand managers start to get fidgety.
This is where they start to think, maybe we should try and change something.
And this when they start trying changing things like green logo is
the actual McDonald's logo, that they are currently using in Europe and
green of course is the a much better color in terms of food.
Green means healthy,
green means fresh but also green means safe, generally safe.
It doesn't mean danger.
Now they've also tried that in Russia and Russian people said, no, no, no,
we do not believe that McDonald's is actually safe.
And in Russia McDonald's reverted back to red.
However, they didn't revert to the previous shade of red.
They instead inverted to a much darker shade of red.
The ketchup red.
And I think that this red doesn't have
that much stopping power as the previous traffic light stop.
So things to know about color.
Colors do have general and context-specific meanings.
Yes, generally red means stop, red means danger.
But in the context of food, mm, red more of less means safe.
Those context meanings overpower general meanings.
If you are in the context of food,
you don't think about the context of traffic, I don't know.
Shades are different.
The dark red is much, well safer, than the bright red.
And one final thing, those general meanings conform to a certain logic.
And let me explain what I mean.
We know that colors exist on a continuum.
Every color is part of the visible spectrum.
There is no correct answer to the question how many colors are there in a rainbow?
The answer should be well, all of them, right.
It all depends on how fine is the cut.
You probably know that there are warm colors, reds and
yellows and cold colors, greens and blues.
Now, what you probably don't know, and what I didn't know until, couple years ago
is that this progression, from red to blue, from infrared to ultraviolet,
is actually a journey from barbarity to civilization if you will.
This is how words for colors appear in languages and
apparently there is some sort of association between the color and
the, l don't know if you will human stage of development.
Red being very barbaric and aggressive and sexual.
And blue being very sophisticated and civilized and this is how things develop.
If we only talked about language not the psychological associations,
this hypothesis was first publicized by Berlin and Kay in 1969.
And what they're saying is that all languages have this distinction between
black and white or between light and dark.
However, not all languages have separate words for abstract colors.
In many languages,
if you want to say, this is green, you have to refer to something else.
You have to say, this is the same color as grass, for example.
Of course, in modern English, green and grass are related.
But they are different words.
They are separate words.
Green is an abstract word which is not used generally for grass.
So we, at first, we have distinction between black and
white, then we have distinction between warm and cool.
We have, for example, one word for both red and yellow and
another word for green and blue.
And then we have separate words for red, separate words for
yellow, separate words for green and blue.
And this is how things develop.
200 years ago in the Chinese language,
there was no distinction between green and blue.
It was the same color for
most of the Chinese, represented by the same character.
Modern Chinese, of course, does have this distinction.
Until the Second World War, for many Japanese there was no
difference between green and blue as you can see from this traffic light.
It is just the same color, for some of the people.
And, once again, more than Japanese, of course does have this distinction.
So I encourage you to read a Wikipedia page.
It is called the color naming debate, so there's still a debate.
But I think this is a very interesting debate to be familiar with.
And we will talk about basic colors.
We will talk about the meanings of basic colors, black and
white, red, yellow, green, and blue.
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