Hi everyone, Lee here for presentationexpressions.com. So today I'm going to talk to you about how to choose colors like a professional. Now, choosing colors for your power point presentation can be a difficult task. I know because I’ve been there, okay especially if you're not best at matching colors. We’ll let you know, some of us aren’t and we can’t help that.
So, but something to remember is relationships between colors is something you need to consider when creating a power point presentation if you want it to be successful. So, all colors come from the three primary colors red, blue and yellow. Then from these colors, we get secondary colors which are very simply the primary colors mixed. So we have blue and red equals violet, red and yellow equals orange and yellow and blue equals green. We then move ion to what we call the tertiary colors. And here we have red violet, red orange, blue violet, yellow orange, blue green and yellow green. Okay so, there we have the tertiary colors.
Now, the combinations of colors are really what we need to focus on here and what colors go with what colors and what colors don’t go with what colors, very, very important. You don’t want to blind your ideas with bad color choice. So as an example, here is a really bad slide. The colors are just really bad here. You can’t even focus on the picture itself because it’s so hidden in the background color in sight. So this is a really, really bad choice, all right. So, here is some matching colors for you.
So the first one I'm going to shoe you is green on violet, a nice match here. You know really contrasting colors so basically you can see the green text very, very clearly there. Then we have the one everybody knows about, white on black again, very contrasting. We can clearly see that white text there.
Then we have violet on yellow. Again, the text is clear. Then we have blue-green on red here. Again, the text is nice and clear. Now that was text, but what about graphics? Okay many of us have to use graphics, don’t we? So here is an example of some graphics for you there, I'm going to show you now.
So here we are, we’ve got basically red and a green. Now we can clearly see here that you know, we can clearly see the difference in this graph, okay. We’ve got the green very clearly on top of the red there. We can see the where offline sales and if you want and the online sales begin, very, very clear there, okay so very important now.

Now of course, when you choose colors, you have to have a clear purpose in mind, so know what you want to say before you choose your colors, and then choose appropriately. So as an example, or a bad example, don’t use too many colors, you’ll overwhelm your audience. And you can see here on this slide, the color choice is really, really bad. Some of the woods you can see clearly, others you can’t, they get lost in the slide, okay?

Now, here’s another bad example actually of orange on red. I mean you can hardly see that text and imagine if you are at the back of the room and somebody used this slide, you can never see the text at all, would you? Now, common meanings, some colors have common meanings really to everybody, okay. One color that gives such a meaning is red. Red is a warning, red tells us to stop. We shouldn’t go any further. Green on the other hand, means that something is safe. You know, as we can see in this traffic sign here or this pedestrian sign, I'm sorry, green tells us it’s safe to cross the street. So we know green is a safe color, we feel comfortable with green.

Now, different colors have different associations. As an example, we often think of green, I'm sorry, we often think of red as hot, don’t we? So you can see here I’ve written this—the word hot in red but—so that’s good but if we look over to the right of this slide, I’ve also written hot in blue and this is bad because often we think of blue as a cold color, don’t we? So although they’re two words, same information, they give us a very different impression, okay.

All right, so what is the action I want you to do here? Well I want you to create a presentation of three to four minutes in length, I want you to use colors within your presentation, then I want you to present to a friend or a colleague and video the presentation. After you’ve finished your presentation, it’s been videoed, watch it with your friend or colleague, get some feedback from them, did you use your colors effectively? Did you use them incorrect, did you use them really well? Okay get to find out, and—so that’s the action, please leave your comments and feedback on this, I hope you find this tip helpful, I'm sure you will, but tell me how you got on when you used it.

So leave your comments and feedback, and as always, thank you very much for stopping by presentationexpressions.com and I’ll look forward to speaking to you next time when I’ll give you another great tip. Take care now, thank you. Bye-bye.