Make your own Powerpoint Karaoke slides
Want to build your own Powerpoint Karaoke slide decks? Here are some tips:
- Build the slides loosely around a topic. If all the slides are completely random, the presenter will have a difficult time turning them into a cohesive presentation. A title on the first slide can help with this.
- Tailor the slides to your audience. Look for what your audience members have in common, and include references to those kinds of things. Are there shared cultural references or inside jokes that you can include? Photos of local landmarks or well-known people in your group?
- Avoid complex slides, with dense graphics or lots of words. It’s difficult for the presenter to improvise smoothly if they can’t tell what the slide is about.
- Include a healthy dose of randomness. Watching how presenters react to unexpected slides is what makes the game fun. If all the slides are strictly on topic, it leaves little room for improvisation.
- Consider crowd-sourcing your slides. Before your event, you can invite your audience to submit topics or images for your slide decks. This can help tailor the slides to the audience and it’s fun for people to see their submissions presented.
- Avoid obscure references. If a presenter doesn’t recognize a person or reference on your slides, they may feel embarrassed. Similarly, the audience won’t see humor in references they don’t recognize.
- Keep your font sizes large. We want to be sure that the text on your slides can be easily read by everyone in the room. As a rule of thumb, try not to go smaller than 24pt.
- Keep your presentations short. Long presentations can get boring, so keep them short! It’s good to aim for about 10 slides per deck.
- Avoid Powerpoint animations & actions. The presenter will expect that each click will bring them to a new slide. To do otherwise would be disorienting.
- Make it clear when the presenter is on the last slide. They’ll lose their rhythm if they think there are more (or less) slides then there actually are. Adding slide numbers can help with this.
- Keep the slides appropriate. Funny slides are good, but don’t cross the line. Always consider whether your slides could offend or alienate someone. When in doubt, leave it out.
- Consider combining your decks. Consider combining your decks into one big slideshow (with spacer slides in-between each deck). This can make the game smoother since you won’t need to switch presentations after every round.
Making your own slides can be a lot of work. Our slides follow the principles above, and you can customize them to make the perfect deck.