Subtitles in one colour, chosen for every film

Over the autumn our captions had become a small toolbox. There were five looks: a pill with the spoken word lit on a brand-colour plate, big uppercase, a chip per word, a quiet lower third, and white type with a coloured outline. On top of that, the spoken word could pop, bounce, glow or slide, and marked words turned the brand colour.

Each option had a reason. Together they made subtitles that competed with the film. A viewer reads a caption in a fraction of a second, and every effect is one more thing the eye has to decode before it gets back to the picture.

The frame we were sent back said it plainly: no edge, one colour, plain words. And then a second note, just as clear: not always black either. The colour should suit the film.

Before drawing anything we read what broadcasters, streaming style guides and reading research say. They agree on a handful of things:

• Contrast is what makes a subtitle legible. Text against what is right behind it should hold at least 4.5:1, the accessibility floor, and more is better.
• A shadow alone is not enough over a light picture. White words with a dark shadow on a white page turn into grey on white.
• Two lines at most, cut where the sentence breathes. Eye-tracking studies of subtitle line breaks found that viewers prefer lines cut at phrase boundaries, and that badly cut lines cost more effort to read.
• Calm words. Subtitles in film and television do not animate word by word. They appear, they are read, they leave.

None of that needs a box, an outline or a lit word. It needs the right colour in the right place.

So every caption style now draws the same subtitle. Every word is one colour, all the time. There is no plate, no chip, no outline, no pop and no glow. The text is in sentence case, bold but not black, with a full space between words.

The five style names stay, because films, looks and the options in our assistants already use them. They now differ only in size: the large style is a size bigger for phone-first films, the small one a quieter lower third. The animation and emphasis settings are still accepted, and the editor says plainly that they no longer change the drawing.

Legibility comes from contrast and a soft, layered halo: a tight core that separates each letter from the picture, and a wider falloff around the word. It reads as clean type, not as a border.

One colour per film does not mean the same colour for every film. The renderer already measures how bright each site's pages are, so the caption now chooses its ink from what is really behind it:

• Over a dark picture, the ink is a white with a breath of the brand in it, on a halo that is the brand's own deepest shade. A navy brand gets a navy halo, a green one a forest green. The pair holds at least 15:1.
• Over a light page, the ink becomes the brand's deep shade, at least 7:1 on white, with a soft white halo.
• Under a landscape browser window, the caption sits on the film's dark backdrop, not on the page, so it takes the light ink even when the site is white.

When dark ink sits over a white page, the gentle fade at the bottom of the frame turns white too. On a white page you cannot see it as a shape, but it clears the page's own small text from behind the words.

The frame we started from had a second problem: the caption filled its first line and dropped the last word, comma included, onto a line of its own.

A caption that needs two lines is now cut where the longer line is shortest, so the two lines are balanced. When a cut right after punctuation is nearly as balanced, it wins, because a comma is where the sentence pauses. A phone number or a figure with its unit is never split, and a caption of four words or more never leaves one alone.

The sentence from that frame now reads "Concevez votre" on top and "bois sur mesure," below: two pieces of one thought, read at a glance.

Every film rendered from today has the same calm subtitles: one colour, no box, no edge, at most two balanced lines. The colour is chosen for your brand and for the picture behind the words, so a white landing page, a dark dashboard and a coloured card each get a caption that reads, in a shade that belongs to the film.

There is nothing to set. If you chose a caption style for a film, it keeps its size. If you chose an animation, the words now stay still. Captions are there to be read, and now they get out of the way as soon as they have been.