Text effects

What this group is for

This is kinetic typography for the terminal: every effect animates the letters themselves, so the emotional register runs from intimate and patient to electric and unstable. The common thread is that the words stop being a caption and start being a performance.

Projects that reach for it: opening and end titles, lyric and subtitle passages that need to feel scored, diegetic computer screens and HUDs, brand stings, and any moment where a single line of text has to carry a beat on its own.

The effects

• text-letter-in — Reveals text letter-by-letter, with stagger setting the per-letter delay and direction running L→R, R→L or random. Good for a title that arrives one keystroke ahead of the music.
• text-letter-out — Dissolves text letter-by-letter, the exact mirror of letter-in. Good for a last line that lets go of the audience slowly.
• text-typewriter — Letter-by-letter reveal with a blinking cursor block riding the writing head. Good for a hacker terminal or a confession typed in real time.
• text-scramble — Letters cycle through random glyphs then settle onto the final character, with chaos controlling the randomness amount. Good for a code-lock snapping into a name.
• text-wave — Per-letter vertical sine displacement. Good for a playful, buoyant lyric line or a children’s-show title.
• text-shake — Per-letter pseudo-random jitter. Good for a word that needs to look scared, loud, or about to break.
• text-rainbow — Per-letter HSL hue cycle. Good for a euphoric chorus or a retro arcade attract screen.
• text-glitch — RGB-shift ghosts plus CRT scanlines, a rare block-tear and vertical jitter. Good for a corrupted system message or a glitchcore drop.
• text-chromatic — Static chromatic aberration laying R/B ghosts along a fixed angle — the calmer cousin of glitch. Good for a cool, controlled sci-fi title that hums rather than screams.
• text-vhs-tracking — Horizontal tear-bands drift vertically and letters inside a band shift sideways, the VHS head-drift look. Good for a flashback title pulled off an old cassette.
• text-flicker — Per-letter brightness drops plus rare full-frame blackout, like a dying fluorescent tube or a CRT warming up. Good for a basement-set horror caption.
• text-neon — A multi-pass blurred halo: concentric tinted copies behind each letter with additive blend. Good for a noir bar sign or a synthwave logo.
• text-hologram — Blue-cyan tint with a thin bright scan band sweeping vertically and a subtle global flicker. Good for a projected sci-fi briefing or a ghost-in-the-machine message.
• text-marquee — Horizontal ticker scroll that wraps per line width. Good for a stock crawl, breaking-news strap, or stadium board.
• text-decode — Katakana, binary or syntax scramble settling onto the final glyphs, trailed by a green decode-halo. Good for a translation-in-progress or a system being cracked open.
• text-light-shaft — Volumetric god-rays where letters act as holes and warm light streaks through them at a chosen angle. Good for a reverent, cinematic main title breaking through a dark frame.

How to reach for it

Find these in the effects tray under the Text group. They only apply to layers whose source is text (a text-render layer) and they run pre-rasterisation, so the result still rounds to ASCII cells — and like any effect, each can be gated by a mask layer so the animation only lands where it earns its keep.