How to Style Your Video Captions for Maximum Engagement

Thanks to a recent product update, Zubtitle now gives you the capability to style your video captions. You have a wide variety of options for customizing your captions, including font family, text size, background color, padding, and more! 

With so many choices, you may not even be sure where to start. You can click here for a detailed “how-to” on the functionality of these new customization options. But if you want more guidance on how best to style your video captions for maximum engagement, read on!

How to Style Your Video Captions

Choose a Font That Matches Your Branding

Before this update, you only had a handful of fonts to choose from. Now you can select from any Google font family. As a result, you have a greater ability to pick the perfect font for your video that will match your branding. There’s a good chance that your brand fonts include at least one Google-supported font. But if that’s not the case, try to select one that is similar in theme to your brand font so that even your video captions fit with your brand’s overall style.

Pro tip: Before you download your final product, make sure you’ve watched through every frame to be sure that every word is readable in the font you chose. 

Optimize Your Text Size

Picking the font family isn’t the end of font customization. You have the ability to change the text size, text color, and font style (bold or italic). Play around with these settings and see which ones you find fit best with your brand and message, while still remaining readable and aesthetically pleasing. 

Pro tip: If you have a font you love but feel like it’s difficult to read at certain points, try messing around with the text outline, text shadow, and background color. Sometimes a different-colored shadow or background can make your font stand out more prominently and become more easily readable.

Choose The Right Colors

When it comes to choosing the right colors, your best bet is always to pick ones that contrast well. Light text on dark background (or vice versa) typically look the best. Resist the temptation to go crazy with colors - it’s a good idea to have at least one neutral color in your palette.

If you’re really struggling, just stick with black and white! It’s a classic, and those colors will go well with practically any video.

Keep in mind that you can also set the transparency of your background. So if you don’t love the way the colors of the text and the background are working together, try turning the transparency all the way down so that the background is clear! If you want only text on the screen, this is the way to do it. 

Adjust Your Padding

Padding is an essential element of video captions, but it may be one that you’ve never paid much attention to. The padding is the shaded background under your caption text.

With our new update, you can now adjust the size of the padding. By dragging the adjustor bar, you can change the padding to take up more or less or your screen. Depending on the purpose of your video and your general aesthetic/preference, you may want to take advantage of this option.

Full Width Background, or Not?

After you’ve gotten the padding sized to your liking, you also have the option to choose whether that padding is full-width or not.

The default setting is full-width. But if you don’t want your padding to take up the entire bottom of the screen, you can click the toggle button for the “Full Width” setting. A great reason to turn off full-width is if you want to put your logo in one of the bottom corners. Reducing the width of the padding allows your logo to be more visible.

Ready to add custom styled captions to your video?

Sign up for a free Zubtitle account today to get started! With our free plan, you can create two videos per month. To create up to 10 videos per month (and remove the Zubtitle watermark), check out our standard plan.

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