Presentation color scheme tip
I have never read this anywhere but I’ll bet $3.19 that I’m not the first to discover it. I absolutely suck at picking colors for anything and presentations are no different. I used to just stick with safe black, white, and greys.
One successful technique I’ve used more recently though in putting together a color scheme for slides is:
- Find a cool picture that you want to use in the presentation (hint: see iStockPhoto)
- Use the eyedropper in Keynote to swipe key colors from the picture for background, fonts, etc
- Rock out!
You end up with a cohesive feel to the whole presentation as the image ties together the key colors. Give it a shot!
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for 
Have you ever tried Kuler? It’s a color picker that will come up with an aesthetically pleasing palate for you from the Adobe guys. I’ve used it for color choosing for a rich client app in the past and it works pretty darn well actually.
Another option, if you’re feeling lazy, is to use something like ColorSchemer or ColorBlender…
Alex, you’ll love “Slide:ology”. Yeah, it’s a design book, but instead of just peering over it’s yellow-tinted small glasses at you, it actually explains how to use design techniques to make a point.
It describes this trick with colors along with other cool stuff. (E.g., how the schematic shape of a diagram can either reinforce your message or totally undermine it.)
I have used house paint websites for selecting colors. Choose one of those pre-fabricated decorating schemes with a few colors on it and eye dropper the colors right off them!
Yep, I am an advocate of both Presentation Zen and Slide:ology (although I haven’t spent much time with the latter yet).
I’ll second the house paint suggestion – I have done that too.