Color Tips for PowerPoint

Dark Room vs. Lighted Room

If the front of the room can be completely dark, choose dark background colors (dark blue, dark purple, black, dark green) for your slides and choose a light color for your text (white, yellow, amber). For the viewer a dark background with light colored text offers the best viewing experience.

Unfortunately, dark colored slide backgrounds are difficult to view in moderate room lighting. This means the lighting around the screen must be completely off for slides with dark color backgrounds to work.

If the room lighting can’t be completely dark, choose a light color background (white, yellow, tan) for your slides and choose a dark color for your text (black is best).

If you are not sure of the room environment that the presentation is going to be viewed-in, play it safe and choose a slide background color that is light.

The 60-30-10 Color Mix

People learn better with color. Too many colors on the slide will make the presenter look like an amateur.

Adult audiences expect to see one color be the dominate color on a screen, around 60%. A second color is used around 30% of the time and a third color is used to direct attention to something about 10% of the time.

Set the Tone

Pick colors that influence the audience and help set the tone of your message.

Black text is the easiest text color to read on a light background color. This makes the color black your 60% color choice.

For your other two color choices, pick colors that help set your tone and may positively influence the audience. Colors are classified as warm or cool.

People see warm colors first and remember text in warm colors longer. Warm colors are red, yellow and orange.

Red can mean danger, excitement, passion or speed, Yellow can feel warm like the sun, make people cheerful or make people happy. Orange makes people feel warm or vibrant.

Cool colors make people feel calm. Cool colors are blue, green, black and purple. Blue is the most popular color. People see blue and feel trust, reliability and loyalty. Green is the color of nature. People feel less stress with green. Green is a good color to stimulate learning. Purple means royalty, spirituality and wealth.