Reader, if you’ve been on the internet for the past 10 years, you’d recognize TEDTalk and Conferences from a mile away.

Most of the time, you would just “know” that a video, photo, or website is from TED!

“Brand identity” your mind would tell you.

You’re right. It is a matter of expert designers and I’m not one.

Buuuuut, I want to walk you through the process of shipping impactful work.

What’s wrong with pasting the Logo on every slide?

Remember when we talked about how every one of us can be a designer in our letter Like most people, do you also think you’re not a designer?đŸ€” My argument is that we don’t need to go to a design school to know that pasting a logo on every slide is not “brand identity”. It is just a bad design. Bad aesthetics. And it is not a matter of taste. It is just bad.

We can do better

Instead, we can use our brand colours. Brand colours are combinations of the colours that your company’s logo uses. And you can use some of those colours as an accent in your documents. It is that simple.

Now, you don’t need to ring your in-house graphic designer to get your “brand colours”. You can do it on your own.

Using Adobe Color to extract brand colours

Let’s find out TED’s brand colours to apply in our PPT.

Step-1: Go to https://color.adobe.com/create/image

Step-2: Get your company’s logo. Any image format would do. For example, I generated a TEDxIndia logo using this logo generator provided by TED.

Step-3: Upload your image to the Adobe Color tool.

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Step-4: Almost done! The tool has extracted different colours from the image. See the Hex codes below the color swatches? They can be used to describe colors across different software.

You can use your choice of color using the Hex codes in your choice of software. For example, if I want to add a thin strip of that dark reddish color on the left, I would enter its Hex value i.e. F20544 in the appropriate box in MS PowerPoint.

In the screenshot below, you can see I have added a rectangle object and made it into a thin strip. When I look for options to change its color, there is a Hex value I can enter.

Step-5: That’s it! No more bulky logos on slides or documents. Just a hint of brand, in an elegant manner.

Impactful designs work on the audience’s psyche

This is just one of the many ways to improve your work by appealing to the psyche of your audience: whether it is a customer, colleague, reader, boss, or just a bunch of investors.

So, next time when you’re watching a TED Talk or passing by McDonald’s or any other store, notice how many levels they reinforce their brand in the viewer’s mind.

So, do you go the extra mile to format your documents?

To make them slightly better?

What thumb rules do you follow?

Hit Reply and share with me.

Reads of the week:

In this essay, Harold Robertson argues what many of the meritocracy supporters have been talking about for quite some time now.

Harold draws our attention to the recent small-to-big disasters and their link to the whole idea of pervasive Diversity hiring practices in most American workplaces and universities.

India follows suit soon after the US. And the trend is easily palpable, catalyzed by the last pandemic. The overt DEI activism, the false narrative of victimhood, and the oppressed-oppressor narrative have made their way even in the most egalitarians of the workplace. In such a cultural scene, Harold’s words serve as a much-needed compass in introspecting the direction, pace, and ethics.