Bottom: The kerns to make this font work better at display size are minor. Top: Malaga, designed with metric kerns for text, needs some adjustment if you choose to use it for display type. If you focus on the tops of letters in the word, you will gain a different impression of the letter relationships than if you focus on the bottoms. Sure, the letters in a word should appear equally spaced, but designers may not agree on what parts of letter relationships are important to look at for good spacing. Another thing that happens occasionally with designer kerning is the tendency to put equal space between letters. Most typefaces (but by no means all) have optimized kerning and spacing for smaller sizes, so a bit of kerning will often make a headline better.īut too much attention to kerning can often result in type that is set worse than the default kerns. It’s also where bad kerning interventions are most likely to happen. And most of time, that kerning is quite good.ĭisplay type, in headlines and logotypes, is what gets the most attention for kerning-as it should. The most common programs used for setting type, including word-processing programs, can recognize the embedded kerning. Since the introduction of digital fonts, most foundries have incorporated kerning values into their typefaces, which is either done visually by the font’s designers, by an algorithmic kerning service, by a font editor’s algorithm or possibly by a combination of the three. The ST in LAST appears tighter than the LA. The operator is producing shows some spacing problems. Well-set (though tight for current taste), the head that The problem arises when people focus on the relationship between individual letters rather than the overall setting.
There is nothing wrong with very tight overall setting in display type: it is a visual style. And this is where overkerning really took hold. While kerning became easy to do, it led to very tightly set type. When film typositors, phototype and digital fonts came along in the second half of the 20th century, letterspacing and kerning became completely under the control of the typesetter. The metric kerning is not perfect, but it is much better than the hand-kerned version. Bottom: This is a digital version of the same typeface, ITC Tiffany Heavy. See the word panic for a particularly notable example. Top: This image from a type shop ad in the 1970s is, ironically, a good example of overkerning coupled with a pathological need to avoid having letters touch each other. You would not see kerning done in text type, though foundries would sometimes incorporate kerns into their designs in metal type, a part of a letter might be made to hang outside the type block-and this overhanging part was called a kern-most commonly for italic. In the days of wood and metal, when kerning meant taking a saw or file to your letters, it was something that might or might not be done in large display type. The famous inscription at the base of Trajan’s column in Rome, predating Gutenberg by almost 1,400 years, shows examples of this.
Problems with judgement in letter spacing have a long history, even longer than typography itself.
The LV in particular is much too tight. Bottom: Carol Twombly’s font Trajan reproduces the original forms quite closely, while the letter relationships are better balanced visually in terms of spacing and kerning. The forms are great, but the spacing less so. Top: The inscription on Trajan’s column, 114 CE, is a model of the Roman square capital. That’s not to say that kerning can’t improve a setting of display type, but overkerning often creates weirder and uglier problems than would be seen by just leaving the type alone-particularly, as is almost always true, when there is kerning present in the font. More problems are caused by overkerning than by lack of kerning. The client may not always be right, but they might well be, in this case. “Looks fine to me,” they might respond when you tell them that you just have to adjust the kerning. But to non–graphic designers, kerning might seem an arcane and unimportant matter. Type not kerned is a sign of designer sloppiness and a cavalier approach to type. Designers are taught often from the first typography course they take that kerning is a crucial aspect of typography.
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