Wear a race number these days and you will find yourself later being marketed to.
One such business model is about selling pictures of people as they compete. Just like school photographs, these images are shown to the proud prospect in a small format and with the photography company’s name emblazoned across the image. (These measures are supposed to provide the supplier with some assurance that they have given enough information to allow a sale -but not enough to cause people not to buy).
In fact, most people want a small picture that can be shown on their smartphone screen -which puts more pressure on the proprietory text. This often uses a simple, thin font in one colour.
Given that you can do image editing/manipulation on your phone, today’s invention is to create a form of captcha-like text to protect such images. It would have thick letterforms in a serif font so that a combination of paintpot and blur tools couldn’t be used to remove the letters cleanly. The letters themselves would each have a subtle colour gradient to compound the difficulty of removing them -without making them less legible.
