Hardwired Colors vs. Color Schemes

[Scott Meyers]

I use three text colors in my presentations. Black is the default for most
text, blue the default for some bullet levels; both defaults are part of the
master page. I use red as a highlight color, which has to be applied manually
in each place it's used. I can specify the use of red (or blue) in two ways.
I can tell the text to be red (blue), or I can modify the design template's
color scheme to use red (blue) as, say, one of the two accent colors (colors 6
and 7 -- the last two in each scheme). Hard-coding the color of the text is
easier, more intuitive, and less error-prone than going through the color
scheme, but using the color scheme makes it possible to modify the color scheme
and have everything come out okay. As things stand now, for example, if I
decided to use a blue background, some of my bullet points would become
invisible (because it'd be blue text on a blue background), but if I instead
specified the color of those bullet levels to be color 6 in the color scheme and
set that to blue, if I changed the slide background color to blue, I could
change color 6 in the new color scheme to, say, yellow, and everything would be
okay.

I don't have any experience with this, so here's my question. Is it worth going
through the color scheme to change text colors, or am I likely to be okay by
simply hard-wiring in the use of blue and red as highlight colors? If the
former, I need to modify my master pages to use the color scheme colors and I
need to set up a color scheme that has the colors I need. If the latter, I can
skip that.

All voices of experience appreciated,

Scott

 

[Guest]

I'd always go with Color Schemes. Since they go hand in hand with Slide
Layouts and Design Templates, it's always worth your while.

See also: http://www.echosvoice.com/colorschemes.htm

 

[Echo S]

I would set up the color schemes. It will take time now, but it will save
you time in the long run.