Titles that do not look like a template

There is a particular look to a video nobody art-directed: white text, centred, in the first font on the list, fading in over a shot it does not quite fit. It is not that any one of those choices is wrong. It is that none of them were choices.

Typography is the cheapest production value there is. Nothing has to be re-shot or re-generated, and the whole job is four decisions you make once and then apply consistently.

One typeface, two weights

The single fastest way to look amateur is to use three fonts. The single fastest way to look deliberate is to use one, in two weights, forever.

There are twelve fonts, with true bold and italic where the family supports them. Pick one for the project. Get your contrast from weight and size — bold at 60 pixels for the name, regular at 28 for the role — rather than from a second family, which is a much louder statement than people expect it to be.

If your workspace has a brand font set, new text starts with it already applied, which quietly enforces this across everything you make.

Size it for the phone, not for your monitor

You are editing on a screen where 24-pixel text is comfortable. Most of the audience is holding a device where the whole frame is smaller than your preview window.

The practical rule: a title should be roughly a tenth of the frame height, and a lower third's name line not much under a twentieth. Scrub the preview down to a phone-sized window and read it from arm's length. If you squint, it is too small — and "too small" is by far the most common failure, because everything looks fine at editing size.

Line length matters as much as size. Text that wraps to three lines is a paragraph, and nobody reads a paragraph on a moving picture. Two lines, six or seven words, is a title. If it needs more, it is narration, not a title.

Make it readable over the picture

Footage moves, and text over moving footage loses contrast for a few frames at a time. Four fixes, roughly in order of how well they work:

• A background box at about 60% opacity. The most reliable, the least fashionable, and the one to use when the shot is busy. Colour and opacity are both adjustable, so a dark box at 60% over a bright shot reads cleanly without looking like a subtitle bar.
• Put the text somewhere quiet. Text does not have to be centred. Over a shot with a subject on the right, the left third is empty and free.
• An outline, thin, for text over footage with mixed brightness.
• A drop shadow, subtle. A soft shadow at low opacity lifts white text off almost anything; a hard black shadow at full strength is 2003.

Colour: white or near-white for almost everything. Coloured text is a brand decision, not a legibility one, and mid-tone colours over footage are where readability goes to die. If you want colour, put it in the box behind the text rather than the text itself.

Placement, and the furniture you cannot see

The edges of the frame belong to the platform, not to you.

• The bottom fifth carries captions, the account name and the description on most vertical platforms. Nothing important goes there.
• The right third of a vertical frame carries the interface buttons.
• On television and in embedded players, the outer few percent can be cropped.

Keep titles inside the middle of the frame, and check a vertical cut against an actual phone before you decide the placement is fine.

Timing: long enough to read twice

A title that disappears before it is read is worse than no title, because it registers as something missed.

Read it aloud at a normal pace, then leave it on screen for about that long again. A rough starting point is one second plus a third of a second per word — four words is about 2.3 seconds — and then adjust by watching, not by arithmetic.

The bar on the overlay track sets exactly when text appears and how long it stays; drag and trim it like a clip, or type the numbers in the Timing tab if you want every lower third to be identical, which you do.

Animate once, and the same way every time

The entrance and exit presets — fade, directional slides, a pop that springs in, and a typewriter that reveals a line word by word — are there to give text a reason to arrive.

The rule is: pick one and use it for everything of the same kind. Every lower third slides from the left. Every section title fades. Consistency is what makes it read as designed; variety is what makes it read as a demo of the animation menu.

Two specifics. The typewriter is excellent on a single short line and unbearable on two, because the audience is waiting rather than reading. And exits should almost always be plain fades — nobody needs a flourish on the way out.

Anything beyond the presets is keyframes: position, scale and opacity, animated by hand, which is how you get a title that tracks with a camera move rather than sitting on top of it.

Captions are the same layer

Auto-captions produce these same text layers, which means every styling option above applies to them: font, box, outline, position.

Style them once, deliberately, instead of accepting the default. Keep the lines short — two or three words at a time reads far better than a wrapping sentence — and keep them clear of the bottom fifth, where the platform's own caption bar lives.

If your titles use one typeface and your captions use another, that is the three-fonts problem wearing a disguise.

Trust the preview

The fonts are self-hosted and rendered by the exporter itself, so line breaks never shift between what you see and what renders. Text exports pixel-identical to the preview.

That is worth knowing because it means the fiddling is finished when it looks right — there is no "check the export in case the wrap moved" step, which in a lot of tools there is.

Where it still goes wrong

Saying what the voice just said. Text that duplicates the narration is noise. Text earns its place when it carries what cannot be heard: a name, a number, a URL, a term nobody can spell.

All caps, at length. Fine for a three-word title, punishing for anything longer — capitals remove the word shapes people read by.

Text over motion. A title over a fast pan is unreadable no matter what you do to it. Move the title to the still shot before or after.

Six different sizes. Two sizes for titles, one for captions. That is the whole system.

The order that works

1. Pick one typeface and get contrast from weight and size.
2. Size for a phone, then check it at phone size.
3. Add a background box at ~60% if the shot is busy; otherwise move the text somewhere quiet.
4. Stay out of the bottom fifth and the right third.
5. Leave it up long enough to read twice.
6. Use one entrance animation for each kind of title, every time.
7. Style the captions to match, and only put on screen what the voice cannot say.