At a thirty-minute contractors' presentation before sixty engineers and scientists, most of whom had flown to the meeting, an engineer projected a set of computer slides with a dark rust type against a brown background. The audience at first thought that the engineer had begun with a blank brown background upon which he would build a slide. Unfortunately, nothing ever appeared. The engineer proceeded to project another slide with the same blank brown background, and the audience began whispering among themselves. The speaker, sensing the agitation from his audience, turned to look at the screen. Not even he, standing a couple feet from the screen, could read the words. This engineer, who later claimed that he could see the contrast on his computer screen, had neglected to try out the color combination on a projected screen. Even if the engineer could see the contrast on his computer screen, he should have given more thought to the colors that he had chosen.

1. Consider the representative colors of your institution. For a company that has blue as its identifying color, incorporating blue into the color scheme of its presentation slides is natural. Sandia National Laboratories, for instance, uses blue as an identifying color. For that reason, many presentation slides representing Sandia use blue either blue lettering on a white background or white lettering on a blue background. Likewise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has green as an identifying color and uses green in a similar fashion.

   The color associated with...