What is the Best Font for Subtitles?
The joys of watching videos on the Web are only really enhanced by the fact that the videos you watch often contain subtitles. In these cases, these captions will be in the same font as the video you’re watching. This is great for simplifying things but not for designing your own custom title sequences to your liking.
Are subtitles important for movies as well? Almost every movie (except some blockbusters that probably wouldn’t include subtitles) does offer subtitled scenes, but many used to make the mistake of reading the subtitles with their eyes rather than the characters. Below are some suggestions for choosing the best subtitle fonts for subtitles.
Overall, I’d say, the best font for video titles and captions is Roboto. I’ve done a lot of work with Roboto, and I think it looks nice on just about any background — too bad some output designers haven’t been able to get this simple font to look great on video as well. Roboto is the default font on Android and most of Google services such as Google+ (RIP), Google Play, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Images.
The Arial Font is also a contender, but again, unfortunately it doesn’t look great on any video. If you have used a PC, then you are familiar with this font since before 2007, Arial was the default font for Window OS. I didn’t know that before I wrote this post, either.
In the end, there’s no right or wrong font for subtitles. You just need to consider how recognizable the font will be to all of your viewers. That means that subtitle text may have to be far enough from the eyes of your viewers that it may be difficult to read, as well as large enough to be easier to read.
