I can't decide which looks best and most clear what do people think?

Personally I would always go for white. Images from a variety of sources tend to usually have white backgrounds e.g. graphs and any scans from books. It looks nice when you can blend these images into the slide without having the big block of white you would get with a different colour slide background.

I personally use dark blue or brown backgrounds and yelllow or black letters. I always like things to be in colour as white backgrounds tend to reflect light and if you dont use dark blue or black then it looks a bit bland

I guess it depends on your slides and presentation room. The rooms I have presented in have not suffered from reflection problems. I tend to have a lot of graphs in my slides giving me the problem of backgrounds that don't match. I try to add colour with navy blue text and borders to please the people bored by the content

It would be useful if you had access to the room/projector that will be used. I mostly use white backgrounds but a couple of times have found that the laser doesn't show up.

Personally I like dark backgrounds. I like the way figures, pictures and graphs stand out as a white square. That said I rarely walk out of a talk and think - I liked the background colour.

I won't get to see the room before my talk because its at a conference that only lasts a day. So I guess I will just have to decide!

i like to use a very light blue blackground. so light that it hardly shows. then black letters. most people never notice that the background is not white - but it is less taxing on the eyes. i got that idea from a professional presenter in the business world once.

for graphs etc. it just means you have to use the same colour background when you make the graph or table, and crop images so that they don't have a white frame around them.

White.

Whilst some dark ones look 'cooler' - you have to cater for people with colour blindness and eyesight difficulties, so if your presentation is, say.. 10 feet away, some people might strain to read light text on a dark background.

Clarity and boringness should sadly win over 'coolness' and whilst I'd actually agree that in most cases, dark looks nicer - You're less likely to end up with an annoyed audience as they'll probably be able to read the text on your presentation if you stick to white.

Thanks PC_Geek. I have vision problems and have struggled in the past to read PowerPoint presentations with too dark backgrounds or too many colours. Plain white background is definitely easiest for me.

Thats interesting. I once had a lecture on presentations during my undergrad course and the lecturer told us that bright yellow writing on a dark blue background was best. I think, if I remember correctly, he said that made it clearer for people who were dyslexic to read. It didn't occur to me at the time that he might not be catering for people with vision problems as he seemed to be trying to make the presentation accessible to everyone. May have to rethink my usual strategy of white on dark blue!

Thanks everyone. I think I am def going to stick to white or a very pale blue.