Legal Writing

Type & Image ? Part III

In our last episode, we continued our discussion about combining type with a real image — an image you could capture with a camera.

The starting point for our discussion (Type & Image) was this combination of type and image, which simply doesn’t work:

What we’re going to do next is see how to set type on an image — any image at all — so the image looks good, and so does the type. We need the type to be very legible (what most call readable).

Suppose you want to set variable copy on a variable image (as in Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP’s home page). And suppose there’s no restriction on the image — it could be anything, dim or bright, colorful or drab, high contrast or low.

How do you set the copy so it’s always legible?

Isn’t that a problem film editors have when they add subtitles to a film?

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Have you ever watched a foreign language film with subtitles and been annoyed that they were so difficult to read at times? I’ll bet you have.

Imagine seeing a film with subtitles and thinking, “gee, these subtitles are really well done. Very legible.” You’ve never done that, have you?

That’s because type is not the sort of thing people notice unless it’s not set right. When it’s very legible, people don’t even think of it.

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We’re going to use the following image of the Supreme Court building for the rest of our discussion on combining type with a real image:

Let’s begin by setting some thin white type on a portion of the image like so:

The type is legible on a flat, dark blue background, but not on a busy background that offers little contrast.

So, how can we set the type so it’s most legible? We see that white type doesn’t work. How about black type?

That doesn’t seem to be much better.

Let’s see — could we set the type in some color that has high contrast with everything in this picture? How about bright green?

That doesn’t work, and nothing does. There’s just no way to set type in one color so it’s legible over the image. Even if we could, it wouldn’t work for all images, which is just what we want.

Suppose we set the type bold? Would that work?

That’s better, but it’s still far from being very legible.

Suppose we add a drop shadow?

That helps. But it’s not enough.

How about even bolder type?

And then suppose we set a very different shadow to all the type (even though it appears as though it’s only applied to some of it).

Now we’re getting somewhere. Just compare the comp above to the one we started with.

But you can see the problem we’ve run into: we can’t put nearly as much text on the image as if we were using lighter type.

In our next episode we’ll see if this problem can be resolved.

Full post as published by Set in Style on March 10, 2010 (boomark / email).