So you’re working on that dope new artwork for quite some time now, and you suddenly realise that a little bit of text that you wanted to put up there isn’t going with the rest of the design. Well well, welcome to the world of graphics designing. Here every pixel can make or break your image. And as it happens, the text has quite a lot of pixels.

Having out of place text on your images and artworks can not only look weird but also has the potential to ruin your entire piece. In this article, we’re going to give you some tips on how you can put up text in your images without ruining the rest of it.

Also read: Photoshop 101: Five tips and tricks for beginners

Watch your fonts

Choosing the right font goes a long way down in resonating what you want. If you have a super formal image, but you decided to write text using Comic Sans MS. don’t be surprised if people don’t take you seriously.

Lighter, thinner fonts tend to do better of minimalistic backgrounds with lighter colour schemes. For illustrations where a lot is going on, try using bolder, heavier fonts.

Basic text effects

If you’re using photoshop (or any Adobe tool for that matter), you have a bunch of text effects at hand that can really make your text pop out.

You can add shadows to your text. You can add strokes, which by the way is the best way I think to get your text looking gracefull and noticeable.

Placement matters

Where you put your text on the image and how you put it also impacts your image a lot. For example, if it’s a title or a name, try putting it the bottom or top (preferably bottom) corners. Nothing feels as out of place as wrongly positioned text.

This also applies to alignment. Sometimes, you’d notice that centre aligning the text, or justify aligning it will make it look way better than left or right alignments.  Also, make sure that there are enough variations in your text as well. You don’t want too much of the same thing.

Try highlighting your text

If nothing else works, you can go ahead and add highlights to your text. Now you can take artistic liberties with said highlights to heart’s content to get the desired results.

You can also consider adding an appropriately coloured background for your text. Just make sure it contrasts well with the background though.

Manipulating the background

Sometimes merely changing the background is the best way to go forward, and in Photoshop, there are a lot of ways you can play around with the background.

The simplest way, as I’ve mentioned in my Video Editing 101 article before as well, is putting a blur on the entire background. However, as you’re working with images, there are other options as well.

You can, for example, try putting a dark transparent layer between the text and the image. You can partially blur the image or even use a solid colour as the background and shift your original image someplace else. Just be creative; eventually, something will work out.

These are some of the ways I’ve learnt to make the text more readable in my images. Have some of your own? Feel free to drop them down in the comments below.

Also read: Photoshop 101: Changing colours in an image