Stranger Things Font Generator
Hollow red capitals with a red haze around them, on black — the 80s title-card look, drawn from your own words. 8 styles, a PNG in two clicks, no signup.
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Red outline: The one people come for: hollow serif capitals, a bright red edge and a red haze on black.
Pick an 80s title look
8 styles. Each one is your text, live.
How it works
How to make Stranger Things style text
Type the words
A name, a birthday, a team title. Short wins — the style was built for two or three words held on a black screen, and every look sets them in capitals for you.
Pick a look
8 to choose from: hollow red on black, the wide-spaced title card, a solid glow, cold blue, VHS white, Christmas-lights colours and an 80s paperback cover. Each thumbnail is your own text, redrawn as you type.
Set the background
Keep the look’s own black, swap it for white, or go transparent for a PNG you can drop onto a poster in an image-and-text editor. The colour picker overrides the letter fill if you want a different shade of red.
Download the PNG
The canvas is drawn large and scaled down on screen, so the file you save is sharp enough to print or to sit in a 1080-wide story. Nothing is uploaded — the drawing happens in your browser.
The typeface
What the real title card is set in
The show’s logo uses ITC Benguiat, drawn by Ed Benguiat and released by the International Typeface Corporation in 1977. It is a high-contrast serif with flared stems and oddly curved terminals, and for about a decade it was the default face for American horror and sci-fi paperbacks — which is precisely why the title sequence, made by Imaginary Forces, reached for it. The Duffer brothers wanted the show to look like a Stephen King cover sitting in a drugstore rack, and the typeface does most of that work before a single frame plays.
ITC Benguiat is a commercial typeface. You buy a licence for it; nobody can hand it out free, and the free “Stranger Things font” downloads floating around are usually unlicensed copies or rough fan traces. This page does not ship either. It draws your words in three open-licence Google Fonts instead — Abril Fatface, Playfair Display Black and Libre Baskerville Bold, all under the SIL Open Font License — and gets the resemblance from the treatment rather than the outlines: capitals only, wide letter spacing, a near-black letter fill, a red stroke around the edge and a red blur behind.
Getting it right
Where the look works, and where it falls apart
It is a style for very few words. The opening holds two, wide apart, for several seconds — that spacing is half the effect, and it is why every look here pushes the letters apart rather than setting them tight. Feed it a sentence and the canvas shrinks the type to fit, the glow closes up the gaps between letters, and the whole thing turns into a red smear. A name, a year, a party line: that is the length it is built for.
The glow also needs somewhere dark to sit. On white it reads as a muddy red halo, and on a printed page it eats ink and still looks grey, so for anything going to a printer use the Hollow style or the paperback one instead. For a video thumbnail the opposite applies: an outline at thumbnail size breaks up into red specks, and Solid glow survives the shrink far better. If you want the letters to look damaged rather than lit, a glitch text generator is a different effect and a better fit, and space-opera title lettering covers the other big 80s opening-credits shape.
Questions