Reels and subtitle readability

Nick Shinn

There’s a hotbed of typography going on at the moment in the subtitles of Tik-Tok format social media reels. 

A lot of experimentation in how to animate the text that transcribes speech. How many words to show at a time, how to highlight them, what kind of layout and type style—that sort of thing.

 It reminds me of the readability experiments where participants are shown one word at a time, but with a profusion of variants of that basic idea, which is to control the pace of reading—quite different from print, in which the reader sets their own pace.

I first noticed the really annoying style of bold condensed caps with a thick flashing red outline (a bit like “LOLcats,” remember that?!) but there’s a lot more variety now.

Nick Shinn

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