Neon Text Generator
Neon text generator: type a word and it glows like a pink tube sign, with letters that flicker on a seeded schedule. Save a PNG or record a looping GIF or MP4.
What makes text look like a neon sign?
A neon sign is a bent glass tube full of neon or some other gas, and it glows when a current runs through it. Georges Claude showed modern neon lighting at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, and his company brought the signs over to the United States in 1923.
Neon by itself glows red. Claude found argon gave a pale, cool blue, and coatings inside the glass added more colors.
On screen you get the look from two things. One is an even stroke, like tubing. The other is light spilling past the edges of the letters, which computer graphics calls bloom.
How to make neon text
Start on the blank canvas, or load a photo or video of a wall to hang the sign on, and type your word in Text. It opens in Monoton (neon), a face drawn in parallel lines like tubing, in hot pink.
Under Kinetic Type, Amount is how often letters drop out, Speed is how fast the flicker runs, and Seed gives you a different run of flickers. Under Bloom, Intensity and Spread control how bright and how wide the glow gets. Threshold is how bright a pixel has to be before it glows, Softness is how gently that eases in, and Tint is the color of the light.
Take away the Bloom and you've got the Flicker motion of Kinetic Typography Maker.
Settings for real red neon, a white-hot tube and a failing sign
Red neon: Colour #ff2a1a, Tint #ff6a4a, and Amount at 0 so every letter stays on. That's the color the gas makes on its own, so it reads as the real thing.
White-hot tube: Colour #e8f6ff, nearly white, with Tint #2fa8ff. The letters look like an overexposed core and the color sits in the glow, which is how a sign looks in a night photo.
Failing sign: Amount 0.7, Speed 0.5. Each letter gets a 49% chance of dropping out at every change, and there are six changes a second. Step through Seeds until the letters that fail are the ones you're after.
Why doesn't my neon text glow?
Bloom only takes light from pixels whose brightest channel clears Threshold, and it measures in linear light, where a mid-tone counts for much less than it looks. A deep color like #8a1c7c has a brightest channel of about 0.25 in linear terms. That's under the Neon preset's 0.45, so no halo.
Keep at least one channel of Colour close to full, as in #ff4fd8, or bring Threshold down toward 0.2. Thin faces glow less than heavy ones, too, because there are fewer bright pixels to spread.
Is the neon flicker random every time?
No. Each letter's flicker comes from a hash of its position in the word, the moment and the Seed, so the same settings blink the same way in every export. A letter that drops out dims to about an eighth of its brightness; it doesn't go completely dark.
A still grabs the flicker at one instant, so your PNG might come out with a dim letter. Put Amount at 0 before you save one.
Saving a neon sign
The halo is a smooth falloff from the tube's color down into black. GIFs build a 256-color palette for each frame and can draw that falloff as visible rings. Tick Dither under GIF in the record settings to break them up into a fine pattern, or just record MP4.
The glow is built from copies of the frame scaled down to a thirty-second of its size. So it keeps the same size relative to the frame at any resolution, and a PNG keeps it exact.