While developing a flash animation for a client I ran into the problem of creating text that works on any background. I was creating a flash animation that had some pictures fading in and out with the text "before" and "after" on them. I wanted to be able to read the text yet still have it looks consistent across the pictures. What I did was create some white text with a slight black shadow and set to 80% alpha. It looks pretty good and is easy to read on any background, excluding pure white. While it does not work well on pure white, it does work if the images are only slightly white. Here is an example of how it looks on some random images:



So you can see, it usually works on a few different kinds of backgrounds.