What you think is cool may be way more than what your audience needs to know

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On September 6, 2021 I received an email from editor Ella Miller in New Hampshire regarding my blog post from way back on February 10, 2009 titled Christmas camouflage graphics: how to lose ~5% of your audience with just 2 mouse clicks. In that post I had linked to the Wikipedia article on Color blindness. She pointed out a new article from August 9, 2021 at MYeyebb titled Everything you need to know about color blindness and suggested I might instead link to it. (An article at The PowerPoint Blog on August 16, 2021 titled Color Blindness in Depth already had linked to that new article).

 

But my February 10, 2009 post was the very first in a series of a half-dozen about avoiding color choices in PowerPoint slides that would confuse a minority of people (mostly men) who had red-green color blindness. It was followed by a second on March 13, 2009 titled An example of “Christmas Camouflage” graphics, a third on April 24, 2009 titled Watch haw u kuler ur slidez: a “Christmas Camouflage” Trifecta, a fourth on November 3, 2009 titled Another example of Christmas camouflage graphics, a fifth on December 8, 2011 titled ‘Tis the season for Christmas Camouflage in graphics, and a sixth on December 20, 2014 titled Christmas Camouflage and why you shouldn’t copy anyone’s slides without thinking first.

 

Readers of my blog didn’t need to know everything about color blindness. They only needed to know how to avoid confusing audiences for their PowerPoint presentations. Since my last post on December 20, 2014 there has been an excellent article by Dave Paradi at Think Outside the Slide on February 3, 2015 titled Testing how a slide looks to someone with a color deficiency; Issue #330. Dave describes using the Coblis Color Blindness Simulator rather than the Vischeck online tool which I had discussed.

 

It is easy to put more information into a presentation than the audience needs to know. On July 12, 2019 I blogged about Chekhov’s Gun – speechwriting advice from a cartoon. That famous Russian playwright once had proclaimed that:

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”