The Art of Coloring and Slide Design

Jan 31, 2011 by     6 Comments    Posted under: Art, Colors, Presentations

I’ve always loved playing with colors. My mother, a well-rounded artist, introduced me to arts at a very young age. She wanted me to learn everything she knew so that one day I could work with her. When I was five years old I made my first tapestry wall art; at age seven I painted my first canvas. Both pieces were small in size and simply meant to motivate me and introduce me to those types of handwork, but as far as sense of accomplishment they were huge to me. When I was ten years old, my mom enrolled me in drawing classes, and twice a week I had to sit in this room with other kids and replicate things like colonial silver jars (like this one) for practice, until I got to the point of actually creating my own drawings. When I was eleven years old I had private classes of making and painting clay sculptures with a really old men who had an gigantic warehouse filled with sculptures of all kinds and sizes, and I always looked forward to spending a few hours with him in that warehouse learning how to treat the clay, and also how to coat with a protective layer before applying any color — the last and so anticipated stage of the process that always brought a smile to my face.

I ended up following my father and brothers’ path and later went to Law school, but I never let go of my artistic side completely. Many years later I found myself in love with art again in the middle of the digital era. A series of [very fortunate] events in my life brought me back to what I always truly loved and in a way my mother had never imagined. Now that I am working with digital art, the memories of my daily visits to my mom’s atelier keep coming back, stronger every day, and I often catch myself remembering my fascination with paints, brushes, and colors, which were always so amusing to me when I was little.

Today, while researching color palettes for a poster I am designing for my husband, I came across this blog post by COLOURlovers: Colors inspiration from the Masters of Painting (which BTW is the source of some of the images in this post). I could have just shared that link via twitter, but this post from COLOURlovers actually inspired me to finally write a new blog post of my own and share a bit about my passion for the art of coloring.

In the slides design realm, color palettes are the most powerful visual element. Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology book has an entire section dedicated to color – that goes from who your audience is to using the power of color and assembling a color palette. Nancy starts this section of the “Using Visual Elements” Chapter by saying that “Color is crucial to your presentation. It sets a tone and helps establish what the audience will expect. It helps communicate what type of journey you will be taking them on… Pick colors that properly represent you, your company, and your stance.”

There are many web-hosted applications for generating color schemes. Here are some of my favorites:

Kuler – the Adobe free tool that you can use to experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

PikNik Color Picker – a different take on your standard color picker. Click anywhere to lock color, scroll to change luminosity, and then copy the values.

0to255 – a simple tool to help you find variations of any color.

So… what tone do you want to set for your presentation?

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  • http://blog.jochmann.me Jakob

    Very helpful insights you have presented here. Two caveats that I have not found commonly addressed, though:

    1. Accessibility. Unlike your personal impression or Nancy Duarte suggest, color need not be the most powerful visual element. In fact, there are up to 15% in your audience who might not get the color subtleties, and a significant share of the population does not see color at all! To them you need to cator as well, make sure they can even see what is on your slide – if you use the wrong color scheme, like red on green (I know, not aesthetically likely) this alienates them. Picking contrasts from the “value” tab of your HSV-scheme, instead of focusing on hue could help out. Nick has shared some thoughts on this recently: http://advanceyourslides.com/2011/01/25/a-quick-and-dirty-design-solution-for-colorblindness/

    2. Cultural differences. I know that not very many designers are likely to work for an audience that lies outside of their cultural realm, but the fact of the matter is that some design rules you have come to take for granted as universal are far from it. So when you read advice on how color relates to emotions etc, take note that this might not translate between cultures. Unfortunately the first links that Google provides for color theory and cultural differences are not really thorough, so I don’t have a nice resource handy. Design for your audience might be yet again the best advice ;-)

  • http://anafxfz.com AnaFxFz

    Thanks for your comment Jakob.

    Designing for your audience is in fact the best advice, and the fact that I wrote a post about choosing the right color palette does not change that.

    This post is about my childhood memories, art, and color, and it was never meant to address any problem. For those who do see color well, the remaining 85% of the population, and I am just explaining how important it is to use color to set the tone of your presentation. I am also suggesting the use of some very handy online tools to research color tones. That is all.

    As you can see, I never mentioned contrast in this post (which is obviously included in picking the right palette) and it was simply because, again, I just wanted to talk a little about art and color.

    As for cultural differences, color is universal! Emotions are the same for all human beings, and the colors that translate warmth in the US will translate warmth in China, Russia or anywhere else. I have a very diverse background, being Brazilian, having French and Lebanese family and living in the US. I also worked in International PR for two years and have experience with audiences from Asia and all countries in the Americas. Believe me, color is color anywhere! … For those who can see it, of course!

    PS.: Maybe one day I’ll write a post that will only address problems with colors.
    PPS.: I have written a blog post about presenting for foreign audiences, where I mention how you can adapt your presentation and relate to the audience in a more effective way.

    Thanks again!

  • http://blog.jochmann.me Jakob

    I never meant to take away from your great introduction into the world of color. Sorry. Perhaps all too smugly I wanted to point out the pitfalls to the nonassuming reader as an addendum.

  • http://anafxfz.com AnaFxFz

    No need to apologize. All constructive criticism is welcome. It’s just that this post in particular was never meant to focus on problems with colors at all.

    Anyway, your comment helped me with a speech I’m preparing about slide design — I’ll now include a talking point about color blindness and using contrast. :)

    Thank you!

  • Nancy Duarte

    Wow, Ana! Sounds like you had a pretty amazing childhood. Very interesting post!

  • http://anafxfz.com AnaFxFz

    Thanks Nancy! :) Indeed I was a very lucky kid, my mom and dad were amazing! :}