Word art generator, bend, colour and light up your text.

A word art generator turns plain text into decorated, shaped lettering for posters, thumbnails, stickers, slides and social posts. This one does it with effects rather than with new letter styles: you can bend the line into an arch or a wave, fill it with a gradient, metal or rainbow, add outlines and 3D depth, and finish with a shadow or a glow. It is a different job from the font generators that swap letters for look-alike characters to paste into a bio. Those give you text to copy. This gives you a picture.

How to make word art

1. Type your text in Your word or words. A short word works best, and you can use up to three lines.
2. Click one of the starting styles under the picture, such as Gold, Neon pink or Rainbow wave. Surprise me picks one and a font for you.
3. Choose a Font. Heavy fonts such as Archivo Black show effects best. Thin fonts lose their outline and depth.
4. Use Bend the text and Amount to shape it. Change Fill style and the colours, and set the outline, 3D depth, shadow and glow.
5. Pick the Background: transparent, one colour or a two-colour fade. Choose the Export width.
6. Press Download PNG or Download SVG. Copy image puts the PNG on your clipboard so you can paste it straight into a design or a chat.

What the bends do

Arch up and Arch down wrap the text around part of a circle. The Amount is the share of a full turn, so 50 bends the line into a half circle (180 degrees) and 100 closes it into a full circle. Wave lifts and drops the letters along the line, Flag does the same while also stretching them, Bulge makes the middle letters taller, Pinch makes them shorter, Rise lifts the right side of the line, and Fan makes the letters taller toward the right.

Fills, outlines and depth

Gold, Silver and Chrome are bands of light and dark that read as metal when the Direction is 90 degrees, which runs from the top of the text down. A Direction of 0 runs from left to right, which suits the rainbow. Sunset bands and Stripes use hard colour changes instead of a smooth fade.

Outline width is measured as a share of the font size, so a style looks the same at every export size. The outline sits outside the letters, so it does not eat into them. The outer line adds a second ring around the first. Depth pushes copies of the letters in the Direction you choose, and the Side colour darkens a little toward the back.

The glow draws a soft halo in its own colour, and it shows best on a dark background. The shadow can be soft or hard: set Shadow blur to 0 and move it across and down for the flat cut-out look.

PNG or SVG

Use the PNG for slides, chat and social posts. With the Background set to Transparent, the corners are clear and the word art can sit on any colour. Use the SVG when you need a vector, such as for a sticker cutter or a print job. The SVG keeps the shapes, gradient, outlines, depth, shadow and glow. The shadow and glow are filters, and some design apps ignore filters, so check them there and fall back to the PNG if they are missing.

Tips for readable word art

• Keep a strong difference in brightness between the fill and the background. A pale fill needs a dark outline or a dark background.
• Use one effect that is loud and let the others be quiet. A glow plus a thick outline plus deep 3D is hard to read.
• For a long phrase, use two lines with a small bend instead of one long arch.

The 16 fonts cover Latin letters, numbers and common punctuation, including accented letters. Other alphabets are not included. To add words to a photo, try add text to a photo. For letters to copy and paste, use the fancy text generator. To turn a word into a full logo, see the logo maker.