What is Pecha Kucha?

The rules in one line

Twenty images, twenty seconds each, and the images move on by themselves. Klein Dytham architecture, the studio that created it, puts it plainly: the images auto forward, so there is no next slide or back one please, and 400 seconds later the next presenter is on. Everything else follows from that constraint. There is no time for a long setup, no way to linger on the slide you love, and no way to recover a lost minute. The speaker has to know exactly what they will say during each twenty second window. Twenty seconds is about two spoken sentences at a comfortable pace, so the whole talk holds roughly forty sentences. That arithmetic is worth doing before choosing a topic, because it shows at once whether the idea fits or needs a different format entirely.

Where it came from

Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham started the format in Tokyo in 2003 as a one off evening for designers to show their work, the name taken from the Japanese for chit chat. It grew into PechaKucha Nights, informal events run by local organisers, which the studio describes as running in over 1,000 cities. The format was designed for creative work, which is why it favours images over text, but it has since been adopted by schools, conferences and companies as an exercise in saying something clearly and briefly.

How to build a Pecha Kucha deck

Write the talk first as twenty short beats, one or two sentences each, since that is what twenty seconds holds when spoken at a natural pace. Then find one image or one short statement that carries each beat. Group the twenty into a beginning, middle and end, perhaps five, ten and five. Rehearse against a timer until the words land with the slide changes rather than chasing them. If a point needs forty seconds, give it two consecutive slides, often the same image cropped differently, rather than rushing. Choose images that are readable at a glance from the back of a bar or a hall: one subject, strong contrast, no fine detail. A photograph that needs explaining costs half its twenty seconds before the point can even begin.

Common mistakes

Treating it as a normal talk with a timer attached is the most common, which produces slides full of bullet points nobody can read in twenty seconds. The second is scripting every word, which works until one sentence is missed and the speaker spends three slides catching up. The third is front loading, spending slides one to five on background and then rushing the idea. The fourth is ending on slide twenty with a thank you, wasting the final twenty seconds that the audience remembers best. Leaving the last slide on the idea itself works better, ideally the one image the audience should still picture on the way home.

Pecha Kucha against Ignite

Ignite, started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis, uses the same twenty slides but advances them every 15 seconds, so talks last five minutes. The difference sounds small and feels large on stage: fifteen seconds is roughly one spoken sentence, twenty is two. Ignite events are more often about ideas and personal stories, Pecha Kucha nights more often about design and places, though both have long since spread beyond their origins.

Where it shows up in the product

The generator's length slider runs from 3 to 20 slides, so a full twenty slide deck can be generated in one go on a paid plan, with the topic and the twenty beats written into the prompt. There is no auto advance or timed playback here, so present mode advances only when you press a key; that suits rehearsal with a separate timer, while the event itself normally runs slides on the organiser's machine from a PDF or PowerPoint file. Gallery templates carry image led slides, and a note per slide holds the sentence you plan to say during its twenty seconds.

Questions people ask