Type Contrast Examples

It’s funny how people who would never put yellow type against a white background seem to have no trouble putting black type against a dark background. We see black type against blue and green backgrounds a lot. In fairness, your computer screen will show more contrast than printing will, because your screen is lit from behind and just tends to show colors lighter than printing does.

We tend to change the type to white when we see this, or your poster will really be hard to read.

One thing that often happens is that the type is in a photo, where it needs to have contrast from both light and dark areas of the photo. My trick here is to put a drop shadow on the text, either white or yellow, so that you will have decent contrast whatever the background. I do that by duplicating the text with control+d, changing the color, and then nudging it into position with the arrow keys.  It’s easier to do that if you turn off snap to grid, and if you zoom to 300 or 400%, you can nudge in very small increments to get it just right.  The text on the bottom of the example shows how a drop shadow can add clarity to othewise hard-to-read text.