A simple UX trick for blog pictures

This post was inspired while I was updating my portfolio site that has a list of blog posts, like this one! These posts have some white text sitting on top of the blog pictures, so the problem that I ran into, and many of you may have run into this before, is the disappearance of the white text when I chose a light picture to represent the blog post, like so (the date at the top left):

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But I didn’t want to just change the text color or the picture, because eventually, I would run into this problem again.

So, here’s the trick, add a text-shadow. If we’re dealing with CSS, make the distance 0px and the blur about 5px. You’ll instantly notice that the text comes back! It’s not perfect, but it’s a quick fix for a problem that will keep coming back, no matter what.

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The only caveat is that your shadow color should be the opposite of the text color. If you don’t know the opposite color of say #C500FF, you can go to Adobe’s color wheel website and select “Complementary” to see the opposite of that color.

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Free Resources

Attributions:
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