WatchTech

 Kerning is the spacing between individual letters or characters. Unlike tracking, which adjusts the amount of space between the letters of an entire word in equal increments, kerning is focused on how type looks — creating readable text that’s visually pleasing. While typeface designers build in spaces around each letter, and sometimes between pairs of letters, those spaces don’t always work in all situations, especially if you’re using a typeface in a way the designer didn’t foresee. That’s when manual kerning comes in. Because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no two kerning jobs will be the same.

“Kerning is a strikingly subjective art form, a designer needs to look at the space between each letter in a word and ask, ‘Does this look like enough space? Does it look like too much? Are the letters too tight?’”

There are a number of situations where one will manually kern the type. Text that looks good at smaller point sizes, such as in a paragraph on a magazine page, may look awkward at larger sizes, like an article headline or a billboard. This is because smaller text sizes need more space between letters to maintain legibility. If you enlarge the text size without manually shrinking the space between characters, you probably won’t like the results. Logos are another example where a font’s automatic kerning may not cut it. Designing a logo demands that one consider the kerning for a variety of applications — signs, websites, mugs, and pencils are all possibilities — and a good designer will kern with these potential uses in mind.

 

“If you’re not a designer, it’s not something you think about; people don’t realize anytime they see giant text, whether it’s on a poster, a billboard, or a website, headline fonts have probably been thoughtfully kerned.”