Places please for effective instruction

In this and the next article, we will examine the effects of color on the human brain and identify ways color can help trainers, teachers, and educators make presentations more effective.

Color. The sky. The grass. The earth. The oceans. Their rich colors are a joy to behold. On a bright, sunshiny day, their colors lift us up. On a dark, stormy day, their colors subdue us. Color clearly affects us. And yet, color is often an afterthought, if thought of at all, in our classrooms. This is unfortunate in three ways.
1. People see color before they absorb content.
2. Every color has a unique wavelength.
3. Our brains respond uniquely to different colors.

Staging Color
Purposeful color may be missing from the classroom but it is critical to the theatrical world. Daytime outdoors presentations lack intimacy, intensity and focus. The natural light is indiscriminate, shining the same on all it touches. But once the sun hides, the stage comes alive with color. Artificial lighting, purposely focused, tells the audience members where to look, what to feel and how to respond. The manipulations, moods and emotions it communicates, enriches, and enlivens the production.

Different colors have specific functions in this colorization scheme. In general:

• Red heightens intensity, suggesting danger, passion and excitement.
• Pink fosters cheerfulness, youth and festivity.
• Orange welcomes friendliness, warmth, celebration and clarity.
• Yellow displays optimism, cheerfulness, sunshine and renewal.
• Green accents nature, calmness, friendliness, integrity, practicality and wealth.
• Blue brings forth sadness, sincerity, peacefulness and serenity.
• Purple bounds with optimism, imagination, royalty, dignity and poise.
• Without these colors, the stage is dark, cold and colorless.

Selling Color
Successful businesses also focus the power of color to establish and communicate brand identity.

• Coca-Cola soda cans are red with excitement and energy.
• The FedEx logo is a combination of relax-it’ll-get-there purple and on-the-move red.
• FedEx also, to launch its ground service, changed the red to an appropriate moving-by-earth green.
• UPS promises safe and sensible ground-brown transportation.
• Pepto-Bismol calming-pink communicates instant relief.
• Home Depot constructed its logo in positive-can-do orange.
• Kodak yellow shines a light for do-it-yourself photographers.
• BP advertises “beyond petroleum” in earth-friendly green.
• IBM (“Big Blue”) offers stability-delivering blue.
• Apple Computer products project high-class ivory for elegance and purity.
• McDonalds golden arches attract attention with a highly-visible-from-a-distance yellow. In addition, McDonald’s French fry containers have a red-for-excitement background, yellow look-at-me-first lines to attract attention and the ever present golden arches shadowed with reassurance-blue.

These companies have carefully selected their colors for the message each color communicates. If you doubt this point, imagine McDonalds with purple arches, IBM in yellow lettering or a bottle of green Pepto-Bismol. The right color can and does make the brand.

A PowerPoint® color case study
A leader of a technical corporate team had a problem. The session she was about to deliver would inform 200 notoriously difficult employees about the possibility that their work schedule would drastically change. It threatened to be an acrimonious session. The client was looking for tools to make the message more palatable. As part of the solution, she focused on color.

There was in fact a potential serious issue in the PowerPoint® presentation that would be displayed for the employees. The slides had placed red text on a black background. The look was dynamic; bold; exciting; demanding. The color scheme was likely to inflame passions and make the session more difficult to present and the audience more challenging to control.

The leader changed the presentation colors to a dark navy background with pale blue text and key positive message points printed in yellow. The presentation went off without major complaint. Although it was not certain that the PowerPoint® color scheme was responsible for the lack of reaction, the changed color scheme did allow the message to be presented without provocation.

In the next article, we will examine the specific effects of color in presentations and identify ways color can help trainers, teachers, and educators make presentations more effective.