Sometimes strict adherence to the principle of contrast can create unpleasant results. Talking about reversed type treatments I offer this warning "Avoid using reversed type on busy photographs. Choose photos with large expanses of uniformly colored areas." I've also ran across a technique that I assume was an attempt to counteract the text over a busy photograph that had problems of its own.

The captions for a page full of both color and B&W photographs were reversed out of the photos - white type over generally uniform, dark areas of the photos. But on a handful of photographs the captions alternated between white type and black type as the captions crossed dark and light areas of the image.

While I imagine the thinking was that this would improve readability — creating better contrast between the text and the background as it changed — what it actually did was create a disconnect, a lack of continuity. Instead of the captions reading as a single coherent sentence, individual words jumped out and it made it harder to read and comprehend the captioning.

Some better solutions, in my opinion, would be to

• move the caption to a different part of the photograph so that the entire caption could be in a single color & still readable
  
  
• choose a different single color, rather than black & white, that was readable against both the dark and light portions of the background and put the entire caption in that color
  
  
• place the caption outside of the photograph.

This entire page had several other problems (too small photographs, too small type for the captions, some captions placed over too-busy backgrounds) but the black/white mixed captions were the biggest roadblock to readability. Contrast is good when it aids readability, not hinders it.

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