Picking a background color for a PowerPoint presentation

Some observations on setting the background color for your presentation:

• Whatever you choose, it should be a plain background without watermarks, logos or shapes. The audience is interested in the content of your slides, not the artwork in the background
• You have a choice of something dark, or something light. Different presentation settings, benefit from different background colors, see a previous post. (The 2 extremes: a big-audience-keynote is usually dark, a small meeting usually light)
• In principle, any dark or light color could work. But, watch out for light "pastel" colors that come out ugly on (poor) color printers or overhead projectors. Also think about working with stock images, there are plenty of images with white or black backgrounds that blend easily into the background, finding one with the perfect marine blue might be more challenging.
• Especially with dark backgrounds, it can be elegant to add a tiny gradient to the color, making the bottomo of the screen 1 shide lighter. You create an effect similar to the color of the sky after the sun just went down.