Presentation Techniques 2: Contrast and Hierarchy

Ümit Dardeh
3 min readJun 17, 2022

Presentation Techniques 1: In my Environment and Projection writing, I emphasized the importance of determining the theme according to the projector together with some technical concepts. In this section, I talk about the meaning of the colors to be chosen in the presentation.

Let’s imagine an environment right away: The projection mirror looks faint in the middle of the day, you have chosen the colors as in the example:

I guess it wouldn’t be very good…

The word meaning of contrast is “contrast” and it is one of the most critical factors that determine the fate of the presentation.

Now, let’s examine this issue through the sample image I prepared:

  • In the first image at the top left, we’ve changed the above unstressed blue-violet combination to create contrast, making it white-blue.
  • The next step is more critical. We made the word CONTRAST yellow to emphasize the importance of the subject. This movement provides a hierarchical balance in our presentations. Show it by color or thickness. Now the word contrast catches our eye, stripped of the other words on the slide.
  • In the third image, we wrote the same text using lowercase letters. It will be our advantage in presentations that lowercase texts are easier to read than UPPERCASE TEXT. (It is important not to tire the people we are presenting, keep it in mind. One of my future articles will be on this subject of fatigue and the psychological effects of presentation.)
    In the last example, I wanted to show that we should never use the Comic Sans font 😊

Paint, photoshop etc. There is an “invert” feature in editing software. You can use this feature to establish the contrast relationship between the background and the presentation content.

This feature will often give you the harmony you are looking for.

Most of the time, because sometimes 2 contrasting colors may not appeal to the eye. Let’s first look at the image below:

Yellow-White-Turquoise is a perfect Cornetto summer love colors❤️

We got the opposite of the colors; We have seen that the opposites are also compatible with each other.

When I inverted the colors reminded me of “Dennis the Menace and Gnasher”

Here I would like to draw attention to the fact that Yellow-Blue, White-Black suit each other, but… What about Red-Turquoise?

I come to conclucion that… we saw that we can use “invert” when creating contrast in the relationship between background and presentation content, but we also warned that “invert” will not always work for us.

So what would you recommend? Isn’t there a practical way of doing this?

Of course there is, stealing! Crashing into ready-made templates… (Kidding.)

There are ways to make this work both original and practical. And much easier than you think.

Here it is: Presentation Techniques 3: Color Palette

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