Brat-style social templates

What you are choosing, and why it matters

Three decisions do all the work here: the size chip, the style chip, and the background. Everything else is the sentence you type. People rush past the first two and then wonder why the graphic looks wrong once it is uploaded — almost always because a square export got pushed through a platform that wanted 9:16, or because a texture style flattened into a screenshot.

The four size presets are chosen to match real crop behaviour rather than approximate it:

The style presets are not filters. Classic BRAT is deliberately blunt: heavy lowercase type, low contrast against a solid field, nothing else on the canvas. Neon Glow adds a soft halo to the letterforms, which reads well on dark backgrounds and dies on light ones. Minimal shrinks the text and gives it air, useful when the words have to sit inside a screenshot. Grain Texture lays a noise pattern over the fill so the image stops looking like a clean UI export — the trade-off is that heavy grain starts eating thin characters once the file is compressed.

Getting a clean export in four moves

1. Type into the Your Text box. Two short lines beat one long one; the canvas wraps, but it does not make judgements for you.
2. Pick the size chip for the platform you are posting to first, not the one that looks best on your monitor.
3. Choose a style, then change the background. The six fills are pre-tuned so that white or black text stays legible against each — BRAT Black, Acid Yellow and Hot Pink want light type; BRAT Green takes either.
4. Hit Download for the current chip, or Download All Sizes when you are posting the same line across platforms and would rather not redo it three times.

Where this shape of graphic earns its keep

• Announcements that need no context. A date, a title, a single claim. The format works precisely because there is nothing else on the image to interpret.
• Covers for vertical video. A 9:16 text card gives a reel or TikTok a legible first frame without touching a video editor.
• Quote cards for newsletters and threads. Drop a sentence in, export 16:9, and the timeline card renders it without cropping the ends.
• Series consistency. Same background, same style, same size, only the words change. Feeds look deliberate when repetition is boring rather than clever.
• Placeholders in mockups. A text block with real weight in it reads far better in a design comp than a grey box.

Two formats, two different jobs

The square export exists for the grid; the vertical one exists for the screen. If you are posting to a profile that people browse as a grid, the square keeps the composition intact when the thumbnails are stitched together. If the post will mostly be viewed full-screen, square exports get letterboxed and look small. When in doubt, run Download All Sizes and use the vertical one in-feed and the square one on the grid.

If the graphic is going to sit behind text you add later — captions in an editor, stickers on a story — pick Minimal and a dark background so the added elements have somewhere to land.

Questions people actually ask

Is the text rendered server-side?

No. The canvas is drawn in your browser and the download is produced from it. What you type is not transmitted, logged, or stored by us at any point.

Why does my download look different from the preview?

Usually a device-pixel-ratio issue: the preview is scaled to fit your screen, while the file is exported at the preset’s true pixel dimensions. Zoom the saved file to 100 per cent before judging it.

Can I put a logo or photo on the card?

Not in this tool. It is a text-and-colour generator by design. Compose the background here, then bring the file into an image editor if you need to layer anything on top.

Does Grain Texture survive Instagram compression?

Partially. Compression is hostile to noise, so grain gets smeared at small sizes. If the graphic has to stay crisp, use a solid fill and keep the grain for large vertical exports.

How do I get the same look as last week?

Write down the three settings — size, style, background hex — and re-enter them. The tool is stateless by intent: no account, no saved presets, nothing remembered between visits. See the colour palette page for copying the hex codes.