how to make brat text in canva, photoshop, and figma

the three things you are reproducing

The green. #8ACE00, which is rgb(138, 206, 0). The text is pure black, #000000. No shadow, no outline.

The squish. Plain Arial, regular weight, scaled horizontally to about 69% of its natural width. Not Arial Narrow, a separately drawn condensed face that does not match. Everything is lowercase.

The blur. A gaussian blur with a sigma of about 0.4% of the canvas edge. On a 2048 pixel square that is roughly 8 pixels, on a 1080 pixel square roughly 4. Scale it with your canvas or the softness reads wrong.

One more detail, and it is not a number you type anywhere: the word is centered on its ink box, the painted pixels, not the line box most software centers. A short word ends up about 27% of the canvas tall. If Arial is missing, Arimo is metrically identical to it and open license, so every width here still holds.

photoshop

Photoshop is the only one of the three with a real horizontal scale control for type. Start here if you have it.

1. 1

   File > New. 2048 by 2048 pixels, RGB color. Any square works; the blur numbers below assume 2048.

2. 2

   Fill the background. Edit > Fill, set Contents to Color, and type 8ACE00 into the hex field of the picker. That is rgb(138, 206, 0).

3. 3

   Type tool, click once. Family Arial, style Regular, not Narrow and not Bold. Color #000000. Type your word in lowercase, sized to fill the frame with a margin: a short word lands around 27% of the canvas in ink height.

4. 4

   Open Window > Character. The panel has a field labeled "horizontally scale" (a T with a horizontal arrow under it). Set it to 69%. Leave the vertical scale at 100% and the tracking at 0.

5. 5

   Photoshop will not blur a live type layer. Rasterize it (Layer > Rasterize > Type), or convert it to a Smart Object (Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object), which keeps both the text and the blur editable.

6. 6

   Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Radius about 8 pixels on a 2048 pixel square, about 4 on a 1080 pixel one.

7. 7

   Center it on the ink. A live type layer aligns by its text box, empty space included, which floats the word high. Once rasterized, the layer bounds hug the painted pixels, so Select All plus the Move tool's align-center buttons land it correctly.

figma

Figma has no horizontal scale property for text. Nothing in the type panel does what the Character panel does, so the squish happens to the layer instead.

1. 1

   Press F, draw a frame, set W and H to 2048. Give it a solid fill of 8ACE00.

2. 2

   Press T, click once, type your word in lowercase. Font Arial, weight Regular, fill #000000. Set resizing to Auto width so the box hugs the word.

3. 3

   Note the W value Figma reports: that is the natural width. Multiply it by 0.69.

4. 4

   Squish it. Press K for the Scale tool, check that the constrain-proportions lock between W and H is off, then drag a side handle inward. Or skip the dragging and type your 69% number into the W field. A side handle dragged with the plain Move tool only rewraps the text.

5. 5

   If the layer resists, flatten it (Ctrl or Cmd plus E) to turn the word into outlines. A vector shape takes a non-uniform width change without argument, and its bounds match the ink, which fixes the centering too.

6. 6

   Blur it. In the Effects section, click the plus and choose Layer blur, not Background blur. Set it to about 8 on a 2048 frame, about 4 on a 1080 one. Figma's control is not labeled in sigma, so treat those as a starting point and trust your eye for the last bit.

7. 7

   Align the word against the frame, then export as PNG at 1x.

canva

Canva is the most limited of the three, and it is worth saying so before you go hunting for a setting that does not exist. Canva has no non-uniform text scaling: dragging a text box handle rewraps the words, it does not compress the letterforms. It also has no gaussian blur for text. The blur effect sits under photo editing and only touches images.

What Canva does get right is the flat part. Start a custom design at 2048 by 2048, click the background, and enter 8ACE00 in the color picker's hex field. Add a text box, set it black, type in lowercase, and pick the most neutral condensed grotesque in the font list. A condensed face is not squished Arial, but it is the closest Canva offers.

There is one honest workaround for the blur. Download the flat design as a PNG, upload it back into Canva as an image, and blur it from the photo effects panel. The frame is one green field and one black word, so blurring the whole image looks the same as blurring the text. It gives you no numeric control, so hitting 8 pixels on a 2048 square is guesswork.

Net result: Canva gets you the green, the lowercase, and a near-enough narrow font. The squish and the blur, the two things that make the look, are the two it cannot do.

what makes a recreation look wrong

Using Arial Narrow. The most common substitution and the most visible. Narrow is drawn as a condensed face, so its strokes stay balanced. Squished Arial thins the verticals while the horizontals keep full weight, and that lopsidedness is the part people recognize.

Uppercase. One capital letter and the whole thing reads as effort.

Too much blur. The target sigma is near 0.4% of the canvas edge. Most people overshoot it by a factor of three, and the word ends up out of focus rather than softly degraded.

Centering the text box. Line boxes carry uneven empty space above and below the letters, so centering the box floats the word high. Center the ink.

A green that is close but not right. It is #8ACE00, and a screenshot of a screenshot is not a color sample.

or do it in one step

None of the above is hard. It is just slow. Figure on about ten minutes per image in a design app, most of it spent re-checking the character panel and nudging the word off center and back. Change the word and you do it all again.

The brat font generator applies the same three transformations at once: the 69% squish, the measured blur, and the ink-box centering, on the correct green, at full export resolution. If you want the reasoning behind the numbers, the font explainer covers why it is squished Arial and not a condensed face.