Color can be a powerful tool for enhancing your presentations.  It can help shape what an audience sees, feels and remembers, and provides presenters with an additional method for communicating ideas and conveying meaning.  Research confirms that color has a strong impact on basic learning behaviors.

Color is convenient and inexpensive to use whether you are in a high or low tech venue. Yet, many people feel insecure about working with colors. What we often fail to appreciate is that we each have a lifetime of experience which began with baby toys and continues through life in nature, art, the media, clothes and furnishings.

Places where you can communicate with color in your presentations and training include:

• Brochures and announcements
• Programs and agendas
• Maps and diagrams
• Content metaphors
• Handouts, job aids and instructional materials
• Visuals aids
• Physical environment
• Evaluation and feedback instruments
• Name tags and name tents
• Garments the presenter/trainer wears

Objectives you can realize with color in the above places include:

• Get attention
• Emphasize a point or point of view
• Highlight one item in a group
• Identify specific features of equipment such as the "on" switch
• Differentiate variables in a graph or chart
• Signal the transition to a new topic
• Prioritize information or data
• Show direction
• Indicate sequence of operations
• Group categories of activities
• Add impact and clarity to drawings
• Control where the eye goes first and whether it moves vertically or horizontally
• Identify recurring themes
• Replicate reality
• Illustrate structure, relationships and patterns
• Map routes and destinations
• Make large collections of data easier to use
• Speed the sorting of information
• Help learners recall key information
• Code information by use
• Make information in manuals, instruction sheets and job aids easier to find
• Create or change a mood
• Help group and re-group the audience for interactive exercises
• Energize the physical space
• Give yourself a jolt of energy

Important Color Considerations

When you are in the design phases of your presentation or training and weighing delivery modes, think about selecting a specific color or a color palette to augment your message. Work the color scheme into the announcement and continue through the content, handouts, visuals and physical environment. Begin by designing color into the announcement media. It is surprising how much an invitation in color alters the response. Use color in the map to provide the route(s) to reach the meeting place and recognize the destination.

If you chose to use slides, select consistent colors for the background, headers, bullets and graphics.  Change them only to reflect a major change in topic. Test your choices for legibility. You want high contrast between the fonts and the background. Generally use light colors for background and dark for text.  Light text on a light background is very difficult to read.  Also, avoid color combinations which color blind people have difficulty distinguishing (green and red, yellow and orange).

Enhance handouts with colored paper, fonts and section dividers. This is especially useful if there are exercises involving the handouts.  "Turn to the light green section of your manual."  "Check the glossary behind the salmon colored divider." Bright colors on the handout covers invite users to look inside and also brighten up a room if they are out on the tables or chairs when the audience enters.

What about the room?  Will it be decorated in institutional neutrals?  You cannot re-paint the walls or re-carpet for your presentation but you can bring color in by using large swatches of inexpensive solid color fabric on the front walls and the speaker table.  Flowers, balloons, posters, banners and streamers add color as well.  Can you control the lighting?  Just because you use slides, you don't have to dim the lights to the point that all the color in the room, including you, fades to black.  Alternatively, don't make the room so bright that it is hard on the eyes and there is a fatiguing glare.

Will there be audience participation?  Can you use color to group and re-group the audience with colored name tags or name tents for interactive exercises? "Will all the light blue tags go to the blue table in the right corner and the green ones in the left corner?"  Enhance interactive tools such as flip charts and greaseboards with color pens.

Consider the colors you wear as part of color communication.  Avoid wearing colors that blend in with the walls and make you disappear. Pick colors appropriate to the occasion, which suggest authority and make you feel energetic and comfortable.

Finally, if you plan to use a participant reaction type of evaluation instrument, use colored paper or colored fonts on white paper.  Color will increase the number of responses and the thoughtfulness of the replies.

Speaking-Tips.com is one of the web's best-known resources for learning public speaking and presentation skills.