What not to do with color

- [Instructor] Color is a really complicated and stressful topic for PowerPoint users, especially those who are non-designers. Now, if that sounds like you, here are a few tips to help you with color. Don't use the PowerPoint standard colors. And I say this to make colors easier on you. There are some colors and color combinations in the standard colors palette that you should avoid. And avoiding the standard colors palette altogether is just easier than remembering all those other little rules.

But I'll break them down for you anyway. So here's the standard colors palette and all of the colors that you should avoid. So for accessibility reasons, for colorblind audience members and light-sensitive individuals, you want to avoid red and green, the combination of blue and red, and red and purple. And it just so happens that all of these colors appear right in this palette. So basically using just this standard palette you could potentially create some hideous, illegible, and not to mention painful slides for some individuals to look at.

On a similar note, don't use PowerPoint theme color variations. That is, unless your company has given you permission to use these colors. Oftentimes when companies hand you a template they've created a custom color palette or theme inside of PowerPoint to go with that template. But here's the thing. PowerPoint automatically takes those colors that those designers have plugged into the template and creates these dark and light variations based on those colors.

And those variations may or may not be acceptable brand colors for your company. Now, some companies don't care that much about color. But some companies really care and really hate that PowerPoint does this. So be sure that you check with your company if it's acceptable to use these light and dark variations of these theme colors. And finally, don't combine too many colors. Color has meaning.

Color on a slide should say, "Hey, look at this. "This is what I'm talking about," or, "This is important." But if everything has color then you are saying that everything is equally important, or rather everything is the same when you could use color to make something stand out. Like in this chart, I don't know what I should be looking at. But in this chart, it's a little bit more clear. Series one is clearly the focus of the slide even without any other context, data, or other information.

By limiting and controlling the color you can control the message and the focus of your audience.