Bubble letters, any word, any size

Make bubble letters for any word, at the size you need

Bubble letters are the round, puffed-up capitals you see on classroom walls, birthday banners, locker signs and the front of school notebooks. This maker draws them for you. Type a word, a name or a short message, choose how tall the capitals should be, and the tool lays the letters out across as many sheets of US Letter or A4 paper as they need. You print, trim the white edges, and tape the sheets together.

Most printable bubble letters online are a fixed alphabet: one PDF, one style, one size, and you print the letters you need one by one. That works for a single initial. It falls apart when you want a name eight inches tall, or Happy Birthday across a doorway, because the letters come out at whatever size the PDF was made at. Here the letter height is a number you choose, from one inch to three feet, and the page count follows from it.

How the bubble letter maker works

Everything happens in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, and there is no sign-up.

1. Type your text. Up to three lines and 60 characters. Each line is centered under the one above, so Happy sits over Birthday the way it would on a banner.
2. Pick a style. Bubble is the classic puffy look. Rounded is bouncier and lighter, good for younger kids. Block is heavy and square for posters and signs. Stencil has bridges built into the letters, so the middles of A, B, O and R stay attached when you cut them out.
3. Choose the letter height. This is the height of a capital letter, the number you would measure on the wall. The preview shows the actual sheets on a one-inch cutting-mat grid, and the line under it tells you how many sheets it takes and how big the whole design is.
4. Choose a layout. Whole word keeps the letters together and tiles them across sheets like a poster. One letter per page makes each letter as big as the paper allows, which is what most bulletin boards need.
5. Download. The PDF is ready to print. The SVG is the design at real size for a Cricut, Silhouette or vinyl cutter, or for Canva and Illustrator.

Printing big bubble letters across several pages

A single bubble capital stops fitting on one sheet of Letter paper somewhere between 7 and 9 inches tall, depending on how wide the letter is, even turned sideways, because home printers leave a margin of around a third of an inch on every edge. When your design is bigger than the printable area, the maker splits it into a grid of sheets and picks portrait or landscape, whichever needs fewer pages.

Every tiled sheet carries small crop marks at the corners of the printed area and a label such as Sheet 3 of 6 (row 1, column 3), so the order is never a puzzle. Trim along the crop marks on the edges that meet another sheet, butt the edges together, and tape them from the back. Our guide to printing large letters covers the order to trim in and how to keep long banners straight.

Set your printer to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks each sheet slightly, so the letters come out smaller than you chose and the joins stop lining up.

Outline or colored bubble letters

The outline setting prints white letters with a strong black edge, ready for kids to color in or for you to trace onto colored card. It also uses almost no ink, which matters when a banner runs to a dozen pages. The colored setting fills the letters in yellow, pink, blue, green or orange with the same black outline, for when you want the display finished the moment it comes off the printer.

Where letters overlap, as they do in the chunky Bubble style, each letter is drawn on top of the one before it, the way people draw bubble letters by hand. Cut around the outer edge of the whole word and the letters stay joined together.

Bubble letter alphabet, numbers and single letters

If you want a ready-made printable rather than a word, the bubble letter alphabet has every capital from A to Z, each on its own page with drawing tips, sizes and a PDF of the uppercase and lowercase letter. There are also bubble numbers 0 to 9 for birthdays, classroom numbers and scoreboards, and a page of lowercase bubble letters.

For other looks, the same maker does block letters for signs and printable letter stencils for painting and spray projects.

Tracing worksheets on the same site

Parents and teachers who print bubble letters for a classroom door usually need name practice sheets too, so this site makes those as well. The name tracing worksheet maker takes one name or a whole class list and prints three-line handwriting paper with the name written out, green dots where each stroke starts, dotted copies to trace and an empty row to write it alone. There is a cursive version and a handwriting practice sheet maker for words and sentences.

How to draw bubble letters yourself

If you would rather draw them, the method is the same for every letter: write the letter normally in light pencil, draw a rounded outline a finger-width away from every line, round off every corner, leave the holes in letters like A, B, D, O, P and R open, then ink the outline and erase the pencil. Each letter page shows where that letter goes wrong, and how to draw bubble letters walks through the whole method with shading and 3D effects.

Fonts and licensing

The four letter styles are drawn from fonts released under the SIL Open Font License or the Apache License, which allow printing and commercial use. You can use what you print here for a classroom, a party, a shop window or a product you sell. The tracing worksheets use the public-domain Hershey single-stroke fonts, which is why the dotted letters are a single clean line to follow rather than the outline of a thick letter. The about page lists each font.