Creating perfect captions is a world unto itself. So, in this article, we are going to look at the biggest and most important part of subtitles: choosing the right font!
We might think that subtitles are just text added to a video and that's it. But in reality, it is much more complicated than that. However, with the knowledge you gain here and the right settings, your subtitles will increase the engagement and accessibility of your video and really make a difference.
Before we dive into what to look for in subtitles and provide a curated list of the 15 best subtitle sources, let's first take a look at why subtitles are so important in the first place.
Why are subtitles necessary?
Subtitles help viewers understand the video better even without the sound enabled. Subtitles on your videos have been shown to increase engagement on social platforms. For example, more than 80% of people watch a video on Facebook without sound. Therefore, you can use subtitles to stand out from other videos and make your content more accessible. If you want to know more about subtitles, keep readingThis article.
Another benefit that subheadings bring is that they have strong SEO benefits. The YouTube engine can use subtitles to understand the content of your video and display it correctly for search queries. This will help you reach a larger audience as you will rank not only on YouTube searches but also on Google.
Now that we agree that subtitles are a must have and have many benefits, let's see what to look for.
What is important when adding subtitles to your video?
There are three main things to pay attention to when it comes to subtitles. Clarity, understanding and easy contemplation.
1. Clarity
Your goal should always be to provide text that is clear and informative, but does not distract or crowd out other visual information on the screen. It's a good idea to customize subtitles with your favorite fonts, colors, and sizes, but remember that subtitles aren't there to distract people from the video, they're there to enhance the viewing experience.
Therefore, the correct subtitle font ensures that viewers do not have trouble understanding the text. That's why adding subtitles with the correct font is key to creating a rich video experience. Choosing a font is the most important decision you'll make when adding subtitles.
2. Understand
In addition to being readable, your subtitles need to be perfectly in sync with the video and perfectly track your audience's reading skills. But don't worry, when you add captions to your video with Type Studio, they'll always line up perfectly. Our engine automatically transcribes every spoken word with highly accurate timestamps.
3. Easy on the eye
While there are always some quick tricks like adding outlines or shadows to make your text stand out, you need to make sure that the font and color are legible or unreadable on different video backgrounds.
If the background is very different, you should choose a fixed title frame. For example this. Another important point is that if you have different aspect ratios, you need to adjust the position of the subtitles. Type Studio helps you with a simple drag and drop editor to easily change position and size.
Let's take a look at the best subtitle fonts for you to choose from.
Top 15 Fonts for Subtitles
#1 Inter
Inter is a carefully crafted family of variable fonts designed specifically for computer screens. A very clean and readable font. The Inter project is led by Rasmus Andersson, a Swedish type designer.
Inter features a large x-height to improve legibility of upper and lower case letters. It also provides several OpenType features, such as B. Contextual alternates that adjust punctuation based on the shape of surrounding glyphs.
#2 Open Sans
Open Sans is a humanistic sans serif typeface originally designed by Steve Matterston. Its characteristics are vertical tension, open forms and a neutral but close appearance. It is optimized for web publishing, print, and mobile devices. It is characterized by excellent readability and legibility in its typographic forms. Open Sans is used on some Google websites and also for online advertising. Mozilla used Open Sans as the default font for websites until 2019 and for the Telegram desktop app.
#3 Lato
Lato is a typeface belonging to the sans serif family founded by Lukasz Dziedzic in 2010. The idea behind this typeface was to create something transparent that, as part of the body of the text, would still display the original properties of the typeface, even with large fonts. The semicircular letters give Lato a warm look. This combined with the strong structure conveys stability and seriousness. A well-known source, but not yet used as a legend by everyone.
file #4
File is a grotesque sans serif typeface originally designed for highlighting and headings. And therefore also perfect for subtitles. This family is reminiscent of the American typefaces of the late 19th century. The technical and aesthetic properties of the font are designed for high-performance typography. It is designed for simultaneous use on print and online platforms and supports more than 200 world languages.
#5 Robots
Roboto is the default font for Android and most Google services, such as Google Play, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Images. The advantage here is that most people are very familiar with this font and the readability is extremely high.
#6 Poppins
Poppins was designed by Ninad Kale and Jonny Pinhorn. It is one of the newcomers in the long tradition of sans serif fonts. With support for the Devanagari and Latin writing systems, it is an internationalist font. Poppins is based on pure geometry and circles in particular. As a result, it's not very noticeable and is therefore perfect for subtle subtitles.
#7 Ruby
Rubik is a family of sans serif fonts with slightly rounded corners designed by Philipp Hubert and Sebastian Fischer of Hubert & Fischer as part of the Chrome Cube Lab project. Rubik is a 5-weight family of roman and italic styles that accompanies the Rubik Mono One, a monospaced variant of the black roman design.
#8
Barlow is a family of slightly rounded, low-contrast sans serif fonts. Echoing the visual style of the Californian public, Barlow shares qualities with state license plates, road signs, buses, and trains. This is the Normal family, which is part of the super family along with the Semi Condensed and Condensed, each with 9 pesos in Roman and Italic. The Barlow project is led by Jeremy Tribby, a designer based in San Francisco, USA. To contribute, see
#9 Goat
Goat is a new grotesque omnibus sans serif typeface. Chivo's power makes it ideal for highlights, headlines, and subheadings. Regular elegance makes it ideal for continuous reading. If you want to caption long videos, this is the font to use.
COMPLIMENT #10
A popular and highly fashionable choice, Verdana is a solid choice for projects that involve technology, innovation, or industry. Verdana is a robust serif font, looks well-constructed, and doesn't take up a lot of unnecessary space at the bottom of the screen for subtitles. If you work on short or feature film projects, this is often the case with science fiction projects as well. By the way, we use this font for our Type Studio emails.
#11 future
Futura is a geometric sans serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. It remains one of the most widely used typefaces. Original was conceived as a contribution to the New Frankfurt project. It is based on geometric shapes, specifically the circle, similar to the Bauhaus design style of the time. It was developed as a typeface by the Bauer Type Foundry in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's pioneering Erbar typeface. It's remarkably clear. You can see it quite often in viral social media videos where on-screen text is key.
#12 place
Like its sister Times New Roman, the Times font is one of the best-known and most widely used typefaces. It is a serif typeface and was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931. It is one of the most popular fonts because it was one of the "default" fonts for Microsoft World. While it's no longer a favorite font for some people, it's still a good font for subtitles because of its non-distracting look.
COMPLIMENT #13
Another simple and safe sans serif font to try first is Arial. Made as a computer font in neo-grotesque style. When it comes to headings and subheadings, you generally don't go for something flashy or distracting. Arial has been a popular choice for years due to its distinct lack of distinction. The typeface was designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders in 1982.
#14 Note without
The Noto project develops fonts to support all the world's languages. It is a family of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Devanagari sans serif fonts. Managed by Google. It doesn't matter what language you want your subtitles to be in. With Noto Sans you can never go wrong and you always get a good result.
#15 MD None
DM Sans is a low-contrast geometric sans serif design designed for use in smaller text sizes. DM Sans supports an extended Latin glyph set that enables composition for English and other Western European languages. It was designed by the Kolophon Foundry. The DM Sans project was commissioned by Google from Colophon, an award-winning international foundry based in London, UK and Los Angeles, USA that publishes and distributes high-quality custom and retail typefaces for analog and digital media. .
How to add custom subtitle fonts using Type Studio
Type Studio is a text-based video editor that runs online. It allows you to automatically create subtitles for your video. It's super easy and fast, and it gives you enough freedom to customize your subtitles and choose your favorite fonts, colors, and sizes. Follow these three steps and you will get great results.
#1 Submit your video
First you need to go to Type Studioregistration pageand create an account that literally takes 1 minute and only requires your name, email and password. You can also sign in with your Google account.
After signing up, you can start uploading your video. Just drag and drop the video from your computer into Type Studio. If you want to create a new video, we will create oneWebcam and screen recorderTo you.
#2 Turn on subtitles
Once your video has been automatically uploaded and transcribed, it will land directly in Type Studio's video editor. There you can enable subtitles by clicking on "Subtitles" in the top menu bar. You can choose between static or dynamic subtitles. That is, they are displayed sentence by sentence or dynamically generated word by word.
#3 Customize the subtitles
Once subtitles are enabled, you can go ahead and give them your preferred style. Choose one of the featured sources or many others. Don't forget to drag and drop them to the right position and also choose a nice color for the font and background.
one last thing
If you want to add native subtitles to your use of an SRT fileYouTube,vimeo,Facebook,LinkedInYou can also do that with videos.