LibreOffice Impress comes with several ready to use colours. As wide is the choice you still want to consider creating your own personal or corporate colour palette.

The first question is if you do have already a corporate palette, a specific set of colour to be used in communication, advertising, leaflet and of course presentations. They are part of the corporate brand beside the font choice if any and the logo. If the answer is yes then you already have specifications for a set of colours: those may be RGB, CYMK or maybe Pantone. In this case you have to convert the values in RGB, search around there are several Pantone converters available on-line.

If you don’t have a corporate palette you could create a custom one for yourself or maybe a specific one for a given presentation. Why? There are several good reasons, here are few:

  • A good palette has colours that go together well and effectively
  • A constrain of few colours push you towards neatness and semplicity
  • You can create a colour code to help your audience understand your visual aids (i.e. a colour for titles, product names, …etc)
  • A consistent use of a palette creates brand awareness and makes it easier for people to recall your style

Creating a good palette is a complex task but luckily there are loads of resources to come to our aid. I personally use Adobe Kuler but you can look around and pick your favourite. At the end you should have a bunch of colours and their corresponding Red Green and Blue values. In Impress you can also describe and create colours by HSB (HSV) or CYMK.

In the following video guide I used Impressive Videos colour palette:

iv_palette

Now I am ready to start to create the palette in LibreOffice, it is quite easy and it is shown in this video guide.

From release 3.5 LibreOffice embeds custom palettes directly into the file which allows easier deployment of palettes.