PowerPoint Secrets: Color (Part 2)

This is part two of a post about sources of color in PowerPoint (here’s the first part).

The first part discussed the basic sources of color – the Color pane that shows up when you Fill a Shape or Text, or set the Outline color, using the Drawing Tools Ribbon or the Format Shape pane. This part will examine some other ways to get color in PowerPoint.

It probably won’t hurt to repeat my basic guideline:

Consistently use a small set of colors (a color scheme) in your presentations – this will help assure a professional, unified impression on your audience. Please don’t make it up as you go along.

In PowerPoint, the tool for helping assure a consistent appearance, including the color scheme, is called a Theme. Use a Theme to define your color scheme (among other things).

Eyedropper

This option appears in the pane that appears when you Fill a Shape, for example:

The Eyedropper allows you to copy colors from a source (usually an image). I used it to set the background and text colors for the banner for this article, “stealing” the colors from the image. Select the option, move the Eyedropper to the color you want and click to color the selected object. Unfortunately, this option is not directly available when you are creating a Color Scheme (see this excellent article on creating a Theme).

Quick/Theme/Preset Styles

PowerPoint provides a number of pre-set “styles” involving colors and some other effects. The feature is available on the Home ribbon (Quick Styles) and the Drawing Tools ribbon (Shape Styles). The pane provides 77(!) options:

This looks like an easy way to select Shape, Outline and Text colors, but it’s more complicated than that. The only options that provide a simple fill from the Color Scheme with no outline are in the fourth row under Presets (Color Fill):

Some of the styles create poor contrast between text and background shape color.

I think these style options are mostly useless. I advise sticking with flat, unadorned shapes, using three or four of the colors in the Color Scheme. But, since you may be tempted to try them, here are a few notes:

• Theme row 1 (Colored Outline) has Background 1 fill; if you want a no-fill version, use Preset row 2:

• f you want a simple Theme Fill without an outline, use Preset row 4 (Color Fill).
• The Theme row 2 options (Colored Fill) include that pesky blue 1 pt Outline (which is not a Theme color or a variation) regardless of the fill color (I enlarged the Outline of the second blue object for clarity ). I don’t know why (see the Part 1 section on defaults).

• Even though it’s not obvious, the Theme row 3 options (Light 1 Outline, Colored Fill) also include an outline that matches the default background color (white with this theme). I have increased the width of the outline and included a blue line behind the object in the second example below:

• The last three Theme options are labeled Subtle, Moderate and Intense (I wonder what happened to Epic and Incandescent?).  I have emphasized the effects below:

• The colors used for these gradients are not in the Color Scheme or the variants.

NOTE: Gradients, shadows, highlights, etc., are out of favor now among designers; “flat” design is recommended.

Text Styles

There are a (mercifully) few text styles (called WordArt Styles) on the Drawing Tools Ribbon:

Some of these actually use Theme Colors but a few don’t.

Here’s my take on this: since you create good presentations, you don’t use much text (right?). So, that text is important. Why use anything but the clearest, cleanest style you can manage? That is, avoid the stuff in this pane.

There are a couple of exceptions where color and an effect may be useful:

• Creating an object that you want to be recognizable that includes text  (a stop sign or a tombstone, for example).
• Using text over a picture or other complicated  multi-color background. Some recommend Shadows to help with the contrast but I like another method (see this post).

Tables, Spreadsheets, Smart Art and Charts

Preset color style options are also available for Tables, Spreadsheets (using Format as Table in Excel), Smart Art and Charts.

In most cases, these styles are divided into two classes: monochromatic and “colorful.” Here is a Chart demonstrating a monochromatic and a colorful option:

I am not a fan of the monochromatic options; the shades of a single color are clearly not as easily distinguished in the chart as different colors, especially for those with vision deficits. If your is so complex that you have to use these fine gradations of color, you should probably start over.

The built-in monochromatic styles also have legibility issues; for example, here is one of the options for a Smart Art object:

PowerPoint’s own Accessibility Checker flags all five circles in this diagram as “hard-to-read text contrast.()”

My recommendation is to avoid the monochromatic options for these graphics unless you have a very good reason to use them (“coolness” or “fun” are not good reasons).

By the way, these style options do not use the color variations shown in the Color pane. For example, here’s a Smart Art graphic based on the Accent 2 color:

I filled the smaller circles with colors from the Color pane that approximate the colors in the graphic. Comparing HSL values shows that the colors selected for the style are not the same as those available in the Color pane.  This is the case for the Chart and Table styles as well. Further, different graphics use different sets of colors.

NOTE: This is probably not an important observation, but it does reinforce the fact that PowerPoint features are woefully disconnected ().

Oddly (and unfortunately), the Smart Art styles do not use Accent 1 (). There’s no sensible reason for this; it’s just a mistake. If you use Smart Art, this may affect your choice for the Accent 1 color.

The styles offered for Tables (and Spreadsheets formatted as Tables) are myriad, to say the least. At first glance, there are 81 (!) styles available for Tables:

To complicate matters, there is a Table option called Banding; here are the banding options for one of the styles:

Taking banding into account, there are nearly 300 style options for Tables.

Microsoft says “banding can make tables easier to read.” This can be true for large tables – the color variations make it easier to “track” across rows or columns. On the other hand, if your table needs this, you may be already in trouble. Rethink your table, use a Chart or use animation to highlight parts of the table as you talk about them.

In addition to color styles and presets, other preset combinations using “effects” like Shadows and 3D Bevels, etc.) are offered for Shapes, Tables/Spreadsheets, SmartArt and Charts:

• Shape Effects/Presets (Home ribbon)
• Effects (Table Tools ribbon)
• Smart Art Styles (Smart Art Tools ribbon)
• Chart Styles (Chart Tools ribbon)

Although these are not the subject of this post, my advice is to use these with extreme care (if at all) in favor of simple, clean, flat graphics that don’t distract your audience or impact legibility.

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