Keeping titles consistent with text styles in Video by Zaweba

Nothing makes a video look homemade faster than titles that don't match. One heading in one font, the next slightly bigger, a third in a different colour because you tweaked it and forgot. Text styles in Video by Zaweba stop that drift by linking titles to a shared style you can change in one place.

Making a style

Start with a title or a text layer that already looks right: the font, size, colour and the rest set just as you want. Create a style from it. That style now exists independently of the title you made it from, ready to be applied elsewhere.

You might build three or four styles for a typical project: one for main headings, one for lower third names, one for small labels, and perhaps one for on-screen quotes. Each title in the film then uses one of them.

Applying and updating

Apply a style to another title and it takes on the same look. The real power comes later. Change your mind about the heading colour, update the style, and every linked title follows. On a long video with dozens of titles, that's the difference between a one-minute change and an afternoon of clicking through clips.

This also means you can make design decisions late. Try a different font on the style, play through, and if it doesn't work, change it back. Nothing has been lost.

Track styles

There's a second level: a track style. Set one on a video track and it applies to the titles on that track and to any new ones you place there. If you keep all your lower thirds on one track and all your chapter headings on another, a track style for each means new titles come out right first time, without you remembering to apply anything.

It suits a series well. Set up the tracks once in a project you reuse, and every episode's titles inherit the same look automatically.

Where styles meet other tools

Text styles work on plain titles and on the text layers inside graphics with layers, so a layered lower third can use the same name style as a simple title elsewhere. Templates you save carry their text, and a style keeps the type consistent across them.

If you open a project on a computer that doesn't have one of your fonts, File > Replace fonts lists what's missing and lets you choose replacements, and the styles still hold your design together.

Habits worth building

Make your styles before you make many titles. It's easier to start with styles than to round up thirty loose titles later and link them one by one.

Name styles by job rather than by appearance. "Speaker name" will still make sense after you change it from yellow to white; "Yellow bold" won't.

And resist one-off tweaks to a linked title. If a single title needs to look different, it probably deserves its own style, or it's a sign the main style needs adjusting for everyone. Keeping Video by Zaweba's styles as the single source of how text looks is what keeps a long project tidy.