Choosing colours for a presentation template that fits

Quick answer

Choose presentation template colours by giving each colour a job: one background, one main text colour, one or two brand accents for headings and highlights, and a short, ordered set for charts. Start from your brand colours, check every text and background pairing for contrast, test on a projector and a phone, and keep the palette small.

A presentation template is where brand colours meet their toughest test. On a website, a pale brand green might look fresh. On a slide, projected in a bright meeting room, the same green behind white text vanishes, and the chart that uses five shades of it becomes impossible to read. Choosing template colours is not about finding pretty combinations; it is about assigning jobs so that every slide anyone in your team makes stays readable and recognisably yours. This guide walks through how to do that, from your brand palette to the theme settings in PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Start from your brand, not from a gallery

If you have brand guidelines, your primary and secondary colours are the starting point, with their exact codes. Resist the temptation to pick a palette from a template gallery because it looks good; a deck in someone else’s colours is a deck that could belong to anyone. If you do not have defined brand colours yet, that is worth fixing first, because the same decision affects your website, signage, vehicles and documents. Our brand identity design, £299, sets colours, typography and imagery together, and our guide to brand guidelines costs explains what a guidelines document covers.

Most brands have more colours than a slide can comfortably use. Choose which ones lead and which stay in reserve.

Give every colour a job

Once every colour has a job, the template does the thinking for your team. Nobody has to decide whether a heading should be teal or orange; the theme decides.

Light or dark background?

Light backgrounds are the safer default. They print well, read clearly in bright rooms and suit most business presentations, proposals and reports shared as PDFs. Dark backgrounds can look dramatic on large screens and in dim rooms, such as conference stages, but they print poorly, can be tiring for long reading, and often look washed out on cheap projectors.

A useful compromise is a light template with one or two dark “section” layouts for title slides and dividers, using your darkest brand colour. That gives the deck rhythm and brand presence without making every slide hard work.

Check contrast for every pairing

Contrast is the difference in brightness between text and its background, and it decides whether people can read your slides. WebAIM’s free contrast checker lets you enter two colour codes and see whether they pass recognised accessibility levels, and its guide to contrast and colour accessibility explains the ratios. Check every combination your template allows: main text on background, white text on your primary accent, accent text on background, labels on chart colours.

Projectors make contrast worse, not better. A pairing that only just passes on your laptop may fail on a projector in a sunny room. Aim comfortably above the minimum for anything people need to read.

Choosing chart colours

Charts are where palettes break down. Five similar shades of one brand colour look elegant in a swatch and impossible to tell apart in a pie chart. Good chart colours are:

• Clearly different from each other, in brightness as well as hue, so they work in greyscale printouts and for colour-blind viewers.
• Ordered by importance. The first series uses your primary brand colour, the second your secondary, then supporting colours, then greys.
• Limited. If a chart needs more than five or six colours, it probably needs simplifying.
• Consistent. The same category should be the same colour across every chart in the deck.

When one figure matters most, colour only that bar or line in the accent and set the rest in grey. It is the quickest way to make a chart say one thing.

Colour and meaning

Colours carry associations, and slides use them constantly: red for warnings or losses, green for growth or completion, amber for caution. If your brand’s main colour is red, think about how that interacts with charts of costs or risks. A slide of rising costs in the brand’s red reads as alarming even when the news is fine. The answer is not to abandon your brand colour, but to decide in advance how it is used. Many templates keep the brand colour for headings and highlights and use a neutral or secondary colour for data, saving red and green for the rare slides where the meaning is genuinely good or bad.

Be careful with colours borrowed from other brands. A deck in a particular purple and yellow may remind people of a well-known company, and a clash of meaning can undermine yours.

A worked example

Take a building firm whose brand colours are a deep navy, a bright safety orange and a warm grey. Its template might use white backgrounds for most slides, with the navy as the main text colour and as the background for title and section slides. The orange becomes the single accent: the highlight bar under headings, the key figure on a chart, the next-step box at the end of a proposal. Charts run navy first, then orange, then two greys, then a lighter navy tint. The warm grey is kept for captions and gridlines.

Checked in a contrast tool, white text on navy passes easily, navy text on white passes easily, but white text on the bright orange is borderline, so the template uses navy text on orange instead. On a projector in a sunlit site office, the deck stays readable, and every slide is unmistakably the same company as the vans and hoardings outside.

Beyond contrast: other readability checks

• Colour blindness. Red and green are the pair most often confused. Check charts with a free colour-blindness simulator, and add direct labels to lines and bars.
• Text on photos. Use a solid or semi-transparent panel behind text placed on images, so the photo never fights the words.
• Size and weight. Thin, small text needs more contrast than large, bold headings to stay readable at a distance.
• Highlight overuse. If every slide has three orange boxes, nothing stands out. Ration the accent so it always means “look here”.
• Screen glare. Glossy laptop screens and shared meeting-room displays reflect light, so mid-grey text that looks fine at your desk can disappear on the day.

Setting the colours in your template

Both PowerPoint and Google Slides let you save colours as a theme, so they appear in every colour picker and update across the deck when changed. In PowerPoint, theme colours sit in a fixed set of slots: two dark and two light colours for text and backgrounds, six accents, and colours for links. Map your roles to those slots deliberately: your primary accent in the first accent slot, because charts use the accents in order. Microsoft’s PowerPoint help centre covers creating custom theme colours. Google Slides has a similar theme builder with fewer slots.

Use exact colour codes from your brand guidelines rather than picking by eye, and save the theme into the template file so every new deck starts with it.

Test it like your team will use it

1. Build five sample slides: a title, a bullet slide, a chart, a table and a photo with a caption.
2. Project them in a real meeting room, ideally with daylight.
3. Open them on a phone, because many decks are now read as attachments.
4. Print one page in greyscale to check charts still make sense.
5. Ask a colleague to make a new slide from the template without guidance, and see what colours they reach for.

Whatever goes wrong in testing will go wrong a hundred times once the template is in use, so fix it now.

Common mistakes

• Too many accents. A template that allows eight bright colours will get eight bright colours on one slide.
• Brand colour text on brand colour backgrounds. Two mid-tone colours rarely have enough contrast.
• Pure black on pure white for long text. A very dark grey on white is often easier on the eye.
• Relying on colour alone to show meaning in charts, such as red for bad and green for good, which colour-blind viewers may not distinguish. Add labels.
• Screen colours expected in print. Bright on-screen colours can print duller; our guide to printer colours not matching the screen explains why.

Keep it consistent with everything else

The template is one piece of a wider brand system. The same colour roles should carry across your website, proposals, social graphics and signage, so a client who sees your deck, then your van and then your invoice feels they are dealing with one business. If those already look different from each other, our guide to a brand that looks different everywhere and our free brand audit checklist help you spot and fix the gaps. Our guide to using your logo covers logo placement on slides and documents, and if the logo itself needs work, our logo design is £129 with every layout included. Every Luxbranding price is on our pricing page.