Typography Presets

Tone field

Independent of style, each group has tone: soft or present.

• soft — gentle fade + 8px y-drift entrance, power2.out ease. Feels floaty, nostalgic. Use for memory, intro, dream.
• present — snappy 6px y + 1.04 scale pop, power3.out, transformOrigin center. Feels assertive, in-the-moment. Use for emphasis and crown.

Picking automatically

Scan each group’s words:

1. Does it contain superlatives (incredible, best, only, never, always) or brand/proper nouns? → emph + present
2. Does it start with discourse markers (you know, so, well, look) or is it short (≤3 words)? → intro + soft
3. Does it reference dreams, hopes, memory, past tense verbs like “was dreaming”? → dream + soft
4. Is it the final sentence-clinching line and feels like a title/headline? → crown + present (only one per video)
5. Otherwise → phrase + (match the group’s neighbors’ tone; default soft)

Font-size scales with column width

The .cap-* defaults in each template are tuned for a ~560px column (the original champion composition). When the caption plane is wider than that, the fonts feel underweight — too much negative space around text. Scale up accordingly.

Notes:

• Crown sizes assume landscape (1920×1080). For portrait 1080×1920, divide all crown sizes by 1.5.
• “full-frame crown” = centered, designed to span 0.8+ × frame_width and cross the subject’s body. Use only when layout-heuristics.md § Crown placement conditions pass.
• “clean-zone only crown” = crown positioned inside one clean zone, smaller font, tail letters lightly touch subject. Fallback when centered crown would eat too much.

Also: if a plane’s rotateY is non-trivial (say > 8°), effective visible width shrinks. Scale fonts up ~10% to compensate.

What NOT to do

• Don’t use more than one crown per render. The whole point is that it’s a singular payoff.
• Don’t use emph on more than ~30% of groups. Emphasis loses meaning when everything is emphasized.
• Don’t pick intro for the main content just because the words are short. “I won” (2 words) is emph or crown, not intro.
• Don’t mix soft and present alternately for no reason. Tone should follow the story arc: soft opening → present build → emph peak → (optional crown climax).

When scene luminance affects color choice

The default color is warm bone-white (#fff5df). Adjust in the template CSS:

• Wall is mostly warm wood / tan → keep default, or shift cooler #e8f0ff
• Wall is cool blue / tech-lab → push warmer #fff0c0
• Wall has strong primary color → desaturate default, luminance first

These adjustments happen in the HTML template, not plan.json. If you repeatedly need different palettes, make new template variants.