Using a proper set of colors for a presentation makes the presentation clear, clean, sometimes formal and more accessible to a greater audience. The following are the resources that I find useful to select suitable color palettes for presentation slides, posters, data visualization representations, etc.
1 Branding Style Guide for the institute that you are working on. In my case, it is Purdue University at the moment of writing.
Using the official color palettes created by the institute makes your work looks formal, professional, and recognizable by the audience. (Watch this video presented by Amy Cesal explaining why data visualization needs a style guide.)
An institute such as a university or a media company usually has a style guide that consists of detailed instructions on how to properly use the intentionally-designed visual and audio elements. The purpose of the style guide is to help you make your works visually (and sometimes verbally) coherent to the branding of the institute. These elements usually include primary (and sometimes secondary) color palettes, logos, fonts, stock photos, video footage, and more.
Here is another example of the style guide for IBM.
2 Adobe Color Wheel that offers artistic color palettes based on color-theory.
Adobe offers a wide range of color palettes that are customizable to your needs. These palettes could be searched based on color harmony rules, e.g., monochromatic, complementary, triad, etc. You may also search the palettes based on themes.
3. Krzywinski’s 12& 15 Color Palletes adapted for the audience with colorblindness.
8% of males and 0.5% of females with Northern European ancestry have various degrees of color-discerning weaknesses. To make sure that your work is accessible to diverse audiences, especially the nature of your work is for the public, you should make sure that as many people can discern the color palette that you have chosen as possible.
Martin Krzywinski, the staff scientist of the Canadian Genome Center, has created twelve to fifteen color pallettes that are friendly to the color-blind audience.
4. Colbis — Color Blindness Simulator that allows you to simulate people with different color blindnesses may see a colored image.
The simulator is a very convenient tool to explore how people with different color-discerning abilities may perceive the images that you have created. All you have to do is uploading the image on the website and select the view from any type of colorblindness. The colors of the image will be altered to mimic the perception of the people with that colorblindness.
Thanks for the great resources! I have used Prof. Cynthia Brewer’s Color Brewer tool (https://colorbrewer2.org) for cartography and GIS before. It is interesting to learn more about the science behind the different color palettes, and to see examples of how people with different color-discerning abilities perceive images. ArcMap, the application I (and many GIS professionals) use at work, is statistically powerful, but can be cumbersome to precisely customize a map’s symbology colors (https://bit.ly/2UX8ryN). Hopefully, future versions will improve this UX (I think that is the term for this). I have little experience with other scientific visualization software, but I would predict they incorporate this better.
Style guides are great! My organization uses one too (unfortunately not available online), I hope our authors considered these principles. I often wondered about attribution and use of clip art/stock images – I’m glad to see that they may be included in the style guide. I just have to get my coworkers to use the guide instead of blank PowerPoint slides!
Hi Joe, long time no chat! I think I have seen the Color Brewer tool somewhere while I was learning about the use of color in data viz, it is a very convenient tool to have especially when you are using colors as an attribute to represent geographical data. ArcMap looks like an interesting app, I’ll check it out whenever possible! I am glad that you find the style guide useful, note that not everything from the style guides is “artistically pleasing”. Lots of dated guides still feature technicolor slides and busy layout. For example, the layout for Purdue’s slides and poster templates are very busy and rigid, I wouldn’t recommend using them.