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Colour
I love retro advertising. In this Mercedes car ad from 1982, body work painting is ranked by its level of “conspicuousness”. White is the most in your face. Signal red somewhere in the middle. And blue midnight blue is even more hidden than black.
The source of the car ad is here. Subscribe to this facebook group for more vintage car ads.
A feature that was long overdue: today we added a color picker to the SlideMagic settings page. Better late than never. Click on the big bar to reveal the pop up. If you want, you can still enter RGB codes. With the eye dropper, you can now sample colors anywhere on your desktop. Make sure to have V3.1.7 installed to use this feature.
(Proud of my daughter Mia who insisted to put this in, and actually wrote the code to do so herself)
President Macron of France changed the blue color of the French flag. He made the blue darker again, after it was set to be the same blue as that of the European Union flag back in the 1970s. (Then president Giscard d’Estaing thought the different shades of blue clashed during photo ops).
I agree with Macron, the darker blue looks better, flags have a history, and i don’t think the two shades of blue clash at all. When doing design work, pay attention to flags. They have very specific colors (like logos), and very specific aspect ratios.
“Upload a profile picture” is the question you often face when creating a new messaging group for an upcoming event, a school parent group, etc. Most people go for a relevant picture, for example the class group photo of last year’s end of school year party.
But avatars are tiny and often have a circle shape. What jumps out most to the user is the dominant color of the image. So the best solution for avatars for these temporary messaging groups is a big bright colorful square (will be come a circle after uploading) with a big bold letter or number. “52” on green for the birthday party, 2 on purple for the 2nd grade parent group. Easy and effective.
(Pro-tip: use SlideMagic to create your avatar…)
Image libraries (including the ones that are available in within SlideMagic) have become so huge that you can afford to be very picky when it comes to image searches. Next time, don’t just use a keyword, but also pay attention to colour. And not just your accent colour of your brand book, but also complementary colours. We will add this colour filtering to the feature pipeline of SlideMagic.
I am in the process of a total overhaul of the SlideMagic web site and using this principle myself, focusing on images that fit with SlideMagic blue, or its opposite, orange.
(Still great to see how SlideMagic’s automatic image cropping gets it right in most of the cases)
SlideMagic uses a simple colour scheme: (just) one distinct accent colour and lots of shades of white/grey/black.
What are good accent colours?
One that stands out
(This is the tricky bit):
One with good contrast with white
One with good contrast with black
One that fits with your brand and/or industry, or the opposite one that really sets you apart from everyone else in your industry if that is what you want to do.
One that you like
People often forget about number 2, which cuts off a lot of creative possibilities with your design
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
Another day, another improvement
I stuck to showing images on slide search results in black and white because I would be sure that the photos would not clash with the accent colour for the slide users had picked (most users will swap SlideMagic blue for their own logo colour). That worked, but it came at a price: slide templates all looked a bit sad. This is not only due to the greyscale colours, but also because of the way the greyscale filter was applied: many colours were translated into too dark tints of grey I think.
This morning I re-rendered the entire slide database (the server is still a bit tired) and images in slide templates now show up in colour.
It is worth the trade-off I think. Of course it is possible to go back to a black and white image in the SlideMagic app, simple untick the ‘colour’ box and the image will show up as grey scale (you can always go back to colour if you want).
The colour option is only available for the slides that I added more recently, after I switched off the colour option when ‘flattening’ or compressing slides. Obviously new templates will all appear in colour, or I will set them explicitly to black and white when I feel that it serves the slide’s message better.
This addition of colour coincides nicely with the more mature SlideMagic product I think, slowly but certainly it comes out in its full shiny colours :-)
Let me know what you think.
Yes, almost all the images on my blog and in the SlideMagic template bank are in black and white. Why?
SlideMagic uses (and encourages you to use) a sober colour scheme: basically different levels of grey with one accent colour that should match the dominant colour in your logo. This is a pragmatic choice. SlideMagic is all about business presentations, not art. More colours require additional design skills to get it right. Too many colours can make a slide busy, can create inconsistencies between slides, make the brand identity of your slide weaker. Yes, a pro designer can get it right, and maybe the amateur as well, but - and that is a very important but - it just adds to the time it takes to create your deck. And SlideMagic is all about speed. One accent colour and greys always looks good.
Full colour images introduce colours to your slide that might not always match your colour scheme. Colour schemes of images can also vary wildly between images, creating inconsistent slides. You often see that professional-grade designs (ads, brochures, web sites) use images that have been selected based on their colour profile. The amateur slide designer does not have time for this. That’s why keeping things black and white solves this issue: images blend in, and images look consistent.
Should all images always be black and white? Absolutely not. Personally, I would go for anonymous images to be black and white, but depictions of real things in full colour; your product, your app screen, your prototype.
And.. unlike the downloadable slides in PowerPoint format, the slides in .magic format can be set back to colour, I just flipped the B&W toggle to grey for the moment. Direct PowerPoint downloads are in black and white only. But this might be your excuse to start using the SlideMagic app, and convert to PowerPoint (with full colour images) if you have to later on in the design process.
Photo by Kensuke Saito Surf Photography on Unsplash
I ran into this slide (fragment) presented on an online course site the other day (I now digest tons of these to refresh my coding skills):
It shows a common problem in PowerPoint: you picked a nice theme colour (deep purple in this case) and you need variants of it. (This presenter figured out that too many colours makes your slide deck cluttered, hence SlideMagic only allows one :-) ).
The default model to make colour changes is to modify its brightness. It almost always work to make things darker, the other way around though can create a problem for very saturated colours. You don’t notice the saturation level at dark levels, but on brighter variants, that elegant purple becomes cute/bright pink.
The solution: change colour saturation as well as brightness. This post on my blog from 10 years ago (what?) describes it:
PowerPoint 2010 gives you the option of a spectrum of different shades of the same color. This is great to design charts with a consistent color scheme.
However, if your template contains colors that are highly saturated, the suggested lighter shades of your color will be too bright to use as neutral color nuances. Here is how you can fix it. (Click on the image for a larger picture.).
Create a new base color by reducing the saturation (in laymen's speak: make it more grey). Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).Reduce the (S)aturation value, while keeping all other variables the same.Use a lighter shade of this new base color instead and save this as a new color in your color template.
A (by now blurry) image with additional clarification:
A simpler approach:iInstead of changing the RGB values of your colour, simply add transparency to the dark colour. This works great on white backgrounds, but will create problems on coloured surfaces.
Another approach building on this:
Create a shape with the dark colour over a white background
Increase the transparency until you reach the desired level of “brightness”
Hover over the box with a colour picker and add the colour you just picked to your slide colour palette.
Photo by Denise Johnson on Unsplash
You can't argue about taste. One of the very first philosophical realisations I had as a child is that there is no way to figure out whether 2 humans perceive color in the same way.
If you use colours correctly, there is actually no need to put your corporate logo very prominently on each page to remind the audience what company they are listening to. Colours will give the page the recognisable look & feel instantly.
Make sure you use the correct colours instead of PowerPoint's default colour scheme. Your marketing department should have the brand guidelines with RGB codes, and if not, you can "steal" them from a logo image using a colour picker. Try saving them as a template in PowerPoint so you don't have to go through this exercise for every presentation you start.
You actually do not need many colours for a page to look great. (My presentation design app SlideMagic only allows you to use one). It is important to think about the relative importance of colours. Which colours can you use often, or for large surfaces, and which ones are meant as accent colour only.
Throughout the presentation, try to use the same colour for the same concept. Everything to do with competitor A is always green. The results for the drug are blue, the control group is orange.
Colour can be a powerful tool to group things together on a slide. Especially if objects are far away from each other, using colour is a much better tool than trying to draw connecting lines.
Watch out with the colour red in financial results. Even a huge profit will look like a massive loss when set in bright red.
A light colour is a much better way to give a box contrast than drawing a dark line around it. I hardly ever use lines around shapes.
If you have dark colours at your disposal, try using them to colour text, especially in diagrams, it will look nice.
Test colours not just on your own screen. Printers and poor quality VGA projectors can wash out subtle colour shadings, making a whole page look unbalanced. Sometimes you might have to design your page specifically for the VGA projector, making them look bad on your usual monitor.
Image from WikiPedia
I am still breaking my head on this, but some colour schemes look great when you see them presented in a brand guideline, but look dull/boring in PowerPoint. More and more I think that this is because what PowerPoint is: basic slide compositions and boring/neutral Arial/Calibri fonts (especially to keep things readable on mobile devices).
One of the nice things about design is that you cannot always explain/rationalise why something "just is not right".
Art: Peter Paul Rubens, Rainbow Landscape, 1636
