Production - Editing Part 3: Designing the Title Card

Getting to the title card stage felt like we were finally close to the finish line. After everything, having something as concrete as a title card to work on was almost a relief. But I also knew going in that it wasn't going to be as straightforward as it sounded. The title card is one of the most important frames in the whole film and it's the moment the audience gets confirmation of what they're watching, and in a rom-com especially, it has to do a lot of tonal work in a very short amount of time.

Nicole took the lead on the actual design in Canva but I was involved in the decision-making the whole way through, and a lot of the back-and-forth over what was and wasn't working happened between the two of us.

Why Canva Instead of Premiere Pro

When I was doing my earlier research into rom-com title sequences, one thing that stood out to me was how much the typography in these films communicates genre before anything else. Anyone But You uses clean, confident lettering that immediately signals something light and fun is coming. That kind of intentionality is hard to achieve when you're working inside an editing timeline; you end up making compromises based on what's technically easy rather than what looks right.

Inspired by Anyone But You

Using Canva gave us the freedom to actually experiment. We could test fonts side by side, adjust sizing, play with color combinations, and figure out what read clearly against different backgrounds before we committed to anything. Once the design was finalized, Nicole would export it as a PNG and we would import it directly into Premiere Pro as an overlay. It would keep the workflow clean and would mean we weren't fighting with the editing timeline to get the typography right.

The Font Decision

From the beginning, Nicole and I both agreed the title had to be hot pink and bold. That wasn't even really a discussion, it came directly out of our genre research. Romantic comedies use color as a signaling system. The brightness, the warmth, the slight over-saturation, all of it tells the audience this is going to be fun and light before a single line of dialogue plays. I wrote about this in my earlier post on genre conventions, and it was one of those cases where the research made a decision feel obvious.

The harder part was finding the right font. The ones Nicole and I had both been drawn to during research weren't available on Canva, which was frustrating because we'd been picturing something very specific. We ended up testing a lot of options that were either too decorative, too generic, or too difficult to read at the size we needed.

Eventually we landed on Norwester, and I think it was the right call. It's bold without being aggressive, clean without being boring. There's a sharpness to the letterforms that gives the title some energy, which matched the tone of the film; Audrey is precise and competitive, and something about Norwester felt like it had that same quality. It also held up clearly against the background without needing any additional styling to make it readable, which mattered because we were layering it onto footage rather than a flat graphic.

The Question Mark and Character Representation

This is the part of the process I found most interesting to think through, even if it was also the most time-consuming. Once the font was decided, Nicole started experimenting with ways to make the title more visually specific to the story. One early idea was replacing or modifying the "O" in "Competitive" with a soccer ball, since the ball is literally the inciting incident of the film since it's what rolls between Audrey and Mattias, what they both scramble for, what sets the whole collision in motion.

However, he Norwester O is slim and narrow, and no matter what we tried, fitting a soccer ball shape into it without it looking messy just wasn't working. Nicole even tried drawing the black pattern marks onto the O manually, but it came out looking rough. It was one of those ideas that made complete sense conceptually and just didn't survive with reality.

What did work was the question mark. The title is "Competitive, Much?" and that question mark is already doing something because it's playful, it's rhetorical and it has a tone to it. Nicole had the idea of transforming it to represent both characters, using objects that connect to who they are: books for Audrey, a hockey stick for Mattias. When I saw the direction she was heading I thought it was clever, because it takes something decorative and makes it meaningful. Instead of just a stylized punctuation mark, it becomes a tiny piece of visual storytelling. The audience might not consciously register it, but it's there.

This was the kind of thinking I'd been reading about during my research into title sequences. The best ones don't just announce the film, they do something. They set up a visual language, introduce a theme, or hint at character relationships. Getting our title card to do even a small version of that felt like a real success