My designer made nav bar buttons with the text already on them, but I dread having to have a separate image for each button, so I decided to make the buttons blank and add real text on top of them. However, the buttons are sorta brass colored, so black doesn't show up real well and white just looks bad. The original design had text that was embossed into the brass so it stood out more. Obviously I can't do an actual emboss with CSS, but is there something I can do to make the black text stand out a little more? Add any highlighting or white drop shadows or white outlines or anything that might emulate a bit of emboss?
AFAIK your options would be to add bold to the text, change the colour of the text, change the dodgy background for the button, or just use the image he's given you with the text on (there are different CSS techniques to have a seperate image for each button in a menu, make sure you do it properly if you choose this route).