Typing text GIFs for your
website., emails., README., slides.

What a typing text GIF is, and why it is a GIF

The typing effect is the line of text that writes itself out one letter at a time, pauses, deletes itself and types the next phrase. On most websites it is made with JavaScript. The trouble is that a lot of the places people want it do not run JavaScript at all: email clients strip scripts, website builders such as Carrd, Umso and Notion sites lock down custom code on headlines, GitHub READMEs only render Markdown and images, and slide software has no letter-by-letter animation that survives export.

A GIF gets around every one of those limits, because it is just an image. Anywhere you can place a picture, you can place a typing animation. That is all this tool does: it draws the animation in your browser, frame by frame, and saves it as a file you can put anywhere.

The rotating-words effect

The version people ask for most keeps the start of a sentence still and cycles the end: “We build websites”, then “mobile apps”, then “online stores”. Put the fixed part in Text that stays and each ending on its own line under Words that type in. The fixed part is drawn in your text colour and the typed words in the accent colour, so the change reads at a glance. Turn on Delete letter by letter for the classic backspace look, or turn it off to clear each phrase at once.

Getting a clean result

• Make it at the size it will be shown. GIFs do not scale up well. Use one of the size presets, or set Fit to text and a font size close to what you need. For retina screens, make it twice as large and display it at half size.
• Keep the palette small. A GIF can only hold 256 colours per frame. Flat colours and solid backgrounds give sharp letters and small files; photo backgrounds work but grow the file.
• Transparent backgrounds. GIF transparency is on or off per pixel, so soft letter edges have to be blended into some colour. Set Colour of the page it sits on to the colour behind the GIF and the edges will match. If the GIF will sit on several colours or a photo, download the animated PNG instead; it keeps true soft transparency.
• Timing. Around 10–16 letters per second reads as natural typing. Give each finished phrase at least a second so people can read it before it disappears.
• Accessibility. Text inside an image cannot be read by screen readers or search engines, so always give the GIF alt text with the full sentence, for example alt="We build websites, mobile apps and online stores".

Where it works

Websites and landing pages on any builder; newsletters and signatures in Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail; GitHub and GitLab READMEs; Notion pages; Google Slides, PowerPoint and Keynote; Slack, Discord, X, LinkedIn and most chat apps. Instagram does not accept GIF uploads to the feed, so for Instagram turn the GIF into a short video with any video editor, or use the story size and upload it as a sticker-style overlay. Step-by-step guides for the most common places are on the blog.