Brand Guide: How to use colours.

Before diving into the what the colour palette is, it’s important to know some terminologies and how they are used first.

Primary colours are the dominant colours in a design which are often used to signify the brand. Secondary colours are accents that complement the primary colours.

Hex and RGB serve as colour languages for a computer. They tell the computer how to display colours on your screen.

They differ only in how they are inputted into the software you are using. Hex stands for hexcode and is a set of 6 characters while RGB or Red/Blue/Green is a combination of numbers for these 3 colours.

In terms of design, the Hexcode is more commonly used. In this guide, we will focus on using colours via Hex.

Here are some do’s and dont’s when using primary and secondary colours.

Primary colours:

Primary colours can be used for fonts and backgrounds, among other things.

As you can see in the sample above, we have two versions. One uses a dark blue background colour with white font, while the other, vice versa.

We do this because we need to prioritise the readability of the message. What if we want to add images?

The first and foremost priority is readability. We can showcase shiny, new images but never at the expense of readability.

In the example above, you can see that the image on the left takes away all the attention from the message and makes the text barely readable.

We fixed this by adding something to lessen the strain on our eyes through a simple rectangle with a bit of transparency to still show our image while making the message readable.

To summarise:

Secondary colours:

These colors are mostly intended to complement or accentuate certain elements in a presentation. They are used to highlight certain parts of the design or message.

Below are two sample images of how it might look to use secondary colours to complement your presentation graphics.

In the images above we’ve applied the colors to complement certain parts of our graph while limiting the number of colours to a maximum of three.

This makes it easier for the eyes and the brain to associate certain statistics to specific colours. We merely applied a “highlight” colour to “Mercury” to showcase its increase from 2017.

It is always good to assess whether you need a primary colour or a secondary colour to highlight any element in your design.

If you can highlight it using primary colours without affecting readability, then use primary colours as much as possible.

Changing colours in PowerPoint:

Here’s a short clip on how to change specific colours on MS PowerPoint.

This next clip shows you how to add your own custom colour pallete so you can easily reuse EduCo colours to your own needs without having to manually copy them in for every item in your presentation.

To summarise:

1. First, click the “Design” tab from the top section of MS PowerPoint.
2. Second, hover over the arrow pointing down in the “variants” section of the tab.
3. Third, hover over “Color”.
4. Then click “Customize Colors” found on the bottom part of the menu.
5. Edit the colors by clicking the color you want to edit and click “More Colors”
6. From there, click the tab “Custom”
7. You will then see the option for “Hex”. Simply paste the hexcode of the color found in the guide to the field and save.

Once you’ve created a colour scheme, you can use it on any of your future presentations and save time on adjusting colours per slide.

Here’s a clip on how to use a colour palette you’ve created.

Every time you edit your presentation’s design elements using your selected colour palette, you can easily change colours because it is now available in the “Theme colors” section.