Your box of 64 crayons never looked more pathetic.

Color is important since there are colors which arouse feelings of joy or sadness, of brightness or of darkness, of excitement or of dullness, and so on.

With a powerful computer, Windows can offer 16,700,000 different colors on the screen, all of which can be adjusted by different levels of hue, saturation, and intensity, and luminescence. It doesn’t really matter what those words mean. It is important to know that you can get just the color you want.

Background colors

Some people say that blue and yellow are a poor combination, but many of Microsoft's preferred backgrounds use that combination.

If you practice your presentation on a small audience, you may be able to get some ideas about good backgrounds.

Which color combinations are best?

Many factors affect this decision:

• The quality of the projector
• The number of people in the room
• The positioning of the people in the room
• How closely the people will be seated
• How successfully the room can be darkened

It's probably best to have a dark background. Add to this some light colored text and graphics.

My own favorite combination is yellow text on blue background.

Furthermore, there may be some members of your audience who are colorblind. The colorblind people in your audience may have difficulty viewing chromatic colors. Chromatic colors are the colors which are formed with red, yellow, and blue, and this will affect the men more than the woman or when men and women are colorblind or partially colorblind.

It's best to be careful about using two or more chromatic colors in your presentation. Your chromatic colors may be seen by those who are colorblind as another one of the primary colors.

The various studies of the different effects of the different colors. Different colors can create different levels of attention.

The different ends of the spectrum do attract attention in different ways. The violet end of the scale attracts attention less while the red end of the spectrum attracts more. The color will affect the degree to which you want to draw attention to a particular item. In this way you might also be able to group items by using colors that are easily related, such as blue and turquoise or red and orange.

Another way of grouping items we’ve noted, is through the use of lines and boxes.

Just as you can group items by using colors which are similar, you can also cause items to look separate and discrete by using colors that do not go together. The color can be the way of doing this visually while you make your presentation orally.

You can also keep track of a presentation sequence by color-coding it.

This can be done well if you maintain the same color throughout the presentation but at a certain point you move through the spectrum in order to show that particular sequence.

Of course, another way to have a particular items stand out in a presentation is by using a certain symbol. That recognized symbol will be repeated during the presentation with different items. Even if you only think about the related items, people understand it either because it is color-coded or because the symbol matches.

A combination of both effects may be best. Use a color-coded symbol, icon, shape, design, or graphic element. Separate out items by using different elements, each one having its own distinctive color-coding. The combination of the color-coding plus the distinct element draws added attention to the category that you want to present, illustrate, or highlight.

Are you worried about your audience forgetting the significance of the different elements?

No problem. Just use a key on each page or on a separate poster elsewhere in the room. Make it easier to keep track by limiting yourself to three to five color-coded elements.