Color

Using color correctly in your documents and presentations can help them look more polished and professional, but using colors incorrectly can do exactly the opposite.

The displays in our phones, tablets, and computer screens are capable of representing 16 million colors, and though most people can only distinguish around one million of these colors, that's still a lot of opportunities to make bad choices, especially when trying to decide which colors work well together.

The most important rule to remember when picking colors is to not pick colors yourself, and to instead use a premade color-palette. A color palette is a set of colors that have been selected to work well together, with most color palettes consisting of five colors.

How these five colors are picked is based on color theory, which is where we get terms such as primary, secondary, and tertiary colors; hue; saturation; brightness; tints, and shades. Color theory is its own discipline of study that dates back thousands of years, and is part of a formal art education. If you don't have a formal education in art, you may consider only using color palettes whose colors are known to work well together.

A quick online search for "color palettes" - palettes spelt P-A-L-E-T-T-E-S - will yield an overwhelming number of color palettes for you to choose from, but your first step should be your marketing department, which most likely will have one or more color palettes defined as a part of their brand guidelines. If you are very lucky, your marketing department may even have document and presentation templates with company color choices already made for you. Suffice to say, if you already have a document and presentation color palette defined by your company, that is the color palette you should use.

If your company does not have a color palette they would like you to use, the next most important rule to remember is that blue is widely preferred in the business world. The problem is, there are a lot of blues to choose from, each with slightly different hues - meaning the particular shade of blue; saturations - meaning the intensity of that blue; and brightness - meaning the lightness or darkness of that blue.

Fortunately, there is a way to narrow down the blues we would like to use by using a color picker. A color picker is an application that tells you the color of a specific pixel on your screen, with that color value usually shown both as an RGB value and a Hex value.

RGB color values represent red, green, and blue with a value from 0 to 255. For example, in RGB, the reddest red is represented as 255, 0, 0; where the bluest blue is represented as 0, 0, 255.

Hex color values represent red, green, and blue with a pair of hexadecimal numbers which are counted from 0 to 9 and then from A to F, for a total of 16 characters, which is where the term "hexa (meaning 6) and decimal (meaning 10)" comes from. For example, in Hex, the reddest red is FF0000, where the bluest blue is 0000FF.

Every pixel on any RGB display is a single color that can be represented either by an RGB or a Hex value, and that is the value we want to select when we use a color picker.

Once you have a color picker installed you can then go hunting for nice-looking business-friendly blues. One approach might be to find a business document that uses a particularly attractive blue, and then use the color picker to figure out that blue's RGB or Hex value. Note that because it is shorter, most people tend to use the Hex value, which by convention usually is preceded by a hash symbol.

Once you have the hex value for your blue, you can then enter that blue into a color palette generator app, which will automatically generate color palettes based on the blue you selected. You will then only have to pick the color palette that you like the most, but with one additional rule: You should avoid color palettes that include bright, saturated greens and reds; as in the business world, bright, saturated greens are used to indicate that something is good; where bright, saturated reds are used to indicate something is bad.

For example, if you had a line graph showing positive sales growth, a bright, saturated green upward trending line would be expected. If instead, positive sales growth was represented by an upwards trending bright, saturated red line, people would be confused, as red means bad, and positive sales growth is good.

Putting this all together, color in a business document or presentation should typically have a blue-based color palette that avoids bright, saturated reds and greens, so that bright, saturated reds and greens can be used in tables, charts, and diagrams to indicate things that are going well, or that things are going badly.

As we use colors such as green and red to communicate important information such as things being good or bad, we should take accessibility into account, as there are people who find it difficult or impossible to distinguish different colors. To make sure that everyone can understand our documents and presentations, we should never communicate information only with color.

In our previous example showing positive sales growth, using color was fine, as even if you could not distinguish the color green, you could still see that the line was trending upwards. Consider instead a table that listed dates, where dates with positive sales growth were green, and dates with negative sales growth were red. In this case, people who could not easily distinguish color may not see which months were good, and which were bad. One possible solution would be to add an arrow icon to each date, with a green up arrow indicating positive growth, and a red down arrow indicating negative growth. In this way, even if someone could not make out the colors, they could still make out the direction of the arrows.

A final thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to text, there should be a lot of contrast between the text and its background. The safest bet is to stick to black text on a white background, but if you choose other text and background colors, make sure that the text is still sharp and very easy to read.

As to how precisely to use your palette within your document, your best bet is to select a pre-made document or presentation template, and to replace the colors in the template with the colors from your palette. In addition to the discipline of color theory, there is also the discipline of graphic design, which is its own artistic area of study. To make your life easier, and to maximize your chances of creating a polished, professional document or presentation, it is best to use a template where someone else has done all the difficult graphic design for you.

Using color in visual communication is a vast topic that requires a considerable amount of time and effort to master. When in doubt, remember that it's OK to stick to a black and white or grayscale document, as it is often better to avoid using color, than it is to risk using color incorrectly.