Tips & Tricks: Improving legibility of text on images
One of the fundamental things you can do either as a designer, or someone creating your own materials, is to understand how to get the best out of combining texts and images. When you overlay text onto a photo different areas of light and dark can reduce legibility. So we asked Amy, one of our Design Managers, to share her top 5 tips for improving legibility of text on images.
1) Position the text in an empty or less busy part of the photo (known as copy space)
2) Think about changing the text colour to make it more visible (known as reverse-out, white-out, knock-out)
3) Use a drop shadow
4) Apply an area of blur
5) Apply a ’scrim’
Scrims are lightweight, semi-opaque layers, used to protect overlaid text. The term ‘scrim’ was used in Google’s recent materials design environment. It’s derived from the textile and theatre industries, where a scrim is a translucent fabric used in stage lighting. Scrims are particularly common in the digital environment, where space for photos and text can be at a premium (such as on hand held devices), and where content needs to be delivered in the blink of an eye.This post was originally published on the emc design blog.