The background of a slide is a topic which has significant debate over what is appropriate and here we will only discuss some obvious choices and what to avoid. While one may be lead to believe that this is the best way to a presentation, it would be better for the presenter personalize his or her presentation style.

White

A white background is professional and does not detract from the presentation. This is appropriate if colours are used for highlights, but it can become very tedious if the majority of the slides are black text on a white background.

Monochromatic

Choosing a single colour with a significant amount of tint (whiteness) may also be pleasing, especially if the colour has significance. The colour, however, should not clash with other dominant colours used to highlight features.

Using bright warm colours for a background will quickly fatigue the audience; however, a cooler colour with white text may be appropriate.

Images

In a word, don't. Using an image as a background will significantly detract from a presentation for a number of reasons:

• The complexity of the image will attract the attention of the audience,
• If the audience is bored with the talk, they will focus on the background,
• The central focus of a presentation should be the message—no background image is going to help a poor presentation,
• It is very likely that some portion of the image will adversely affect surrounding slide content, and
• It is more likely that a colour-blind person will be adversely affected by certain portions of the slides.

Default Backgrounds

PowerPoint comes with a number of default backgrounds, as shown in Figure 1. The first is exceptionally familiar while the reader may suspect that the second will become very frustrating very quickly for technical presentations. The third and fourth defaults have the interesting property that the title or text blends with the background. The fifth and sixth have titles which are similar in shade to the background. None of these would be acceptable backgrounds for technical presentations and simply because a background is shipped with a product does not imply that it is automatically a good design.

Figure 1. Various default PowerPoint backgrounds.

The ECE Background

As an example of a background, consider the default ECE background shown in Figure 2. This is used by departmental talks for undergraduate students. It is the shield of the University with sufficient tint to blend it into the background. While this is an appropriate background for a departmental welcome, it is, however, still, an inappropriate background for a technical presentation: the background, while subtle would still distract the audience and it would be difficult to determine when and how the background could interfere with the content on the slides. Such a background would, unfortunately tire the audience if used in a presentation meant to either persuade or inform the audience.

Figure 2. The ECE background.