Your guide to word cloud customization

Word cloud is an audience favorite among Poll Everywhere activities. Seeing words pop, grow, and fly across the screen draws many “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience. Word clouds energize your audience and keep them engaged with your presentation. Together, these words tell a visual story.

Take this visual story to the next level – combine words in a word cloud and use a custom gradient color palette. Together, these changes create more colorful, customizable word clouds that are sure to impress the audience.

Creative word cloud features in Poll Everywhere

updated word cloud showing new features

Combine multiple words in a single word cloud response


Use an underscore (“_”) or tilde (“~”) between words to submit them as a single word cloud response. That means submitting “Peanut_Butter” will appear as “Peanut Butter” (without the underscore) in the word cloud. “Peanut” and “Butter” will not be separated into different words, but instead appear as a single, combined phrase.

Word cloud showing combined words

 

Set a custom gradient color palette for word cloud responses


Previously, Poll Everywhere randomly selected 20 colors for each word in the word cloud and presenters could not customize them. If the background was similar to one of those colors, some words were tough to read.

To improve readability – and creative potential – of word clouds, Poll Everywhere has two new colorful options for presenters to customize the look of all words in the word cloud to match the presentation’s theme.

Word cloud showing color gradient

Set custom gradient:You can now set two colors for your word cloud responses. The most popular responses appear with the first color, the least popular appear with the second. Everything else appears with a color in the spectrum between those two. This option is located under the visual settings menu, under color scheme.

Word cloud showing dark background

Automatic contrasting:If you change the background of your word cloud, but not the color of the responses, Poll Everywhere will automatically adjust the response color to help them stand out against your new background.

Get creative with colors

Now that you have the freedom to customize your word clouds, it is time to get creative! Create endless color combinations to fit your themes. Quizzing about the United States of America? Go with a red, white, and blue color scheme. Asking about autumn? Use red, brown, and orange.

Once you’ve spent time beautifying your word cloud, share it on social media. Use the #PollEverywhere or tag us @PollEverywhere to be featured on our page or to find creative inspiration from other Poll Everywhere presenters. For more inspiration, check out 25 questions to make anyone smile.