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Making Text Easier to Read
Hi folks,
Right now, I am working on a project where I need to have text. On the background I have a bunch of dark objects on a white background moving around. I need to figure out a way to really make the text viewable whether it is over the white background OR the dark object. Right now, I have black text with a white drop shadow, but it still doesn’t look great. If anyone has any ideas about this, I would appreciate it! Thanks.
Dave
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3 Replies
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The general solution I use to make the text work over any background (dark or light, as you said)is to use white text with a soft drop shadow at 70 or 80 percent opacity, then spread the soft drop shadow so that it covers all edges of the white text. You end up with sort of a black, transparent cloud that kicks out the white text when it’s over a light background, but dissappears when you’re over a black background.
You can also set your white text with a hard black drop shadow, offset a few pixels from the white (depending on where you want your light source to come from), then put a glow on it, and change the glow color to black. This gives you a few more options than the first solution, in that the glow plugin in AE has lots of settings tweaks. Always err on the side of readability. Good luck.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TVI
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With the project I’m on now, a 70% opaque black box behind the text works nicely, and is a nice change from Joe’s method (which I usually use). One might call it RetroBasic 🙂
Peter
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Use yellow characters.
Put an edge on them.bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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