This morning I worked with a challenge that turned out to be much more interesting than I had expected. I wanted to put text on top of a very highly patterned background, just barely making the text legible but not too legible. The goal was to make the observer curious and work a little to read the text. The solution I finally settled on was to add a narrow (4-pixel) border around the letters to isolate them slightly from the background. It did the trick.