Colour contrasts?

[ffutures]

The cover of the RPG is going to be a lot of gold coins with dragons on them. I need to make the lettering a good contrasty colour - black sort of works but I'm not convinced it's best. I've used red a lot on previous stuff, any suggestions for an alternative?

Here's what the cover looks like at the moment:




Any suggestions?

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Put a 4pt white stroke around the outside of the letters and it'll look fine.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

White stroke? You mean a border around the letter?

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

You should also stack the title:

Tooth <--Big
and <--Small, possibly italic or cursive
Claw <-- Big

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of making the "and" smaller since it's on the cover of the book that way. Agree it does look nicer.

[ckd]

Either use heliograph's suggestion of a white stroke, or have the background fainter (translucency may be the answer here, or adjusting levels so that they run from 50%-100% brightness instead of 0-100%).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Adjusting the brightness would be easier with the elderly software I'm using - I'll give it a try.

[lillian13.livejournal.com]

I would suggest a couple of things (since I don't know what program you're using):

Do a drop shadow (or copy the text, make as a layer under it, and nudge until it mimics one) in red, to offset the black.

If your layout/art software supports it, dropping a gradient across the text looks really nice--you could do a red/black one.

Personally, I would make the lines under both your and Jo's names smaller, and not in an all-caps format, but that's just me.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's Word, so I suspect that most things will be a pain to do... not a huge fan of gradients in text, but making those lines smaller does sound like a plan.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I agree that some sort of white lining is necessary for the black text. It disappears too much into the texture of the coins otherwise.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

If you want an alternative colour (and bearing in mind that all the other suggestions here will be equally applicable if not more so to bring it out) might I suggest a rich dark green?