What is good kerning?

[Member Era…]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I have recently really started to doubt my own typographic eye after certain critique from a older designer about kerning. And since there are never hard and fast rules about kerning, i thought a discussion will put my mind at ease!

I just came out of the new Bond movie. And it is not my intention to sound like a smart ass, but i would like to bring two examples to the table for discussion.

First, Did they kern the O so close to the D on purpose? Leaving a a large gap between the O and the N?

Second, In my opinion space between the E and N is too wide compared to N and A. And "ITALY" seems to be really loose compared to "SIENA".

I just wanted to know what other people think, so I know if its the type, or if its just me...

p.s. Apart from squinting... do any of the more experienced typographers in this forum have techniques they use? In particular, I find myself 'lost in the type' after kerning it for a while, and i am unable identify the problematic spacing as easily.

Thanks!

Eric.

[Member Chr…]

Eric, your eye is right on.

I agree with all the issues you've pointed out on these samples.

I think kerning is overlooked by many designers, and sometimes it slips by me as well. But, I'm not surprised by this, I've seen poor kerning on book covers, logos, etc. I guess it's something that younger designers aren't trained to pay attention to. Maybe there's an assumption that the computer will do it correctly.

As far as working on kerning, it's easy to get lost after a while, since you can adjust between two letters, which affects another pair, and so on. I think the best thing is to work on it for a bit, then step away. In my earlier days I remember working with an art director who had me kern a headline for an entire afternoon.

[Member hra…]

Maybe the older guy meant that those are supposed to look wonkily spaced, in that context?

BTW, better to call this letterspacing, as kerning is more useful to mean what a font designer does in a font, as opposed to what happens in an instance of a font being used.

hhp

[Member cha…]

I think I'd disagree on the E-N being too wide. If you look along the top of the line of type, the space between the E-N-A is about as good a compromise as you can get. In this particular case, one could argue that the eye isn't going to look along the upper half of the letterforms on the first line because of the positioning of the second line, but my eye, anyway, does fall there.

As you say, so much is subjective. Many times all one can do is to go with a first impression, or as Chris suggests, walk away & take a fresh look.

[Member Wil…]

In the example of the E and A, a problem here is that the 'falling over' italic A of Caslon (and other faces?) often works very nicely with lower case, but is generally problematic in all caps. You end up having to do compromises, as Charles writes--but they never really work as well as you would hope.

In my new Caslon revival (soon, soon!) there is an alternative italic A that works better with all caps, and automatically substitutes when choosing open type "all caps".

This is illustrative of a general point that glyphs need to be designed to space well; it doesn't just happen.

And yes, my experience is also that going away, and coming back later for a fresh look helps.

[Member inn…]

I'm obviously young, but when I hear letterspacing, I think of the equidistant value of space between the letters.

When I hear kerning, I think of the individual space between two specific letters.

For me to adjust letterspacing, would make all the letters closer or farther apart at once, but kerning is the manual manipulation of the space between 2 letters, while leaving the other untouched.

Am I wrong? These definitions seem to be in line with what I read, and they certainly aren't interchangeable in my eyes, they represent two very different concepts...

[Member bre…]

sloppy kerning in films... it would appear to be rampant at the moment

http://www.flickr.com/photos/x1brett/3047882002/

[Member Sup…]

Also, people tend not to baseline shift hyphens and parentheses.

[Member hra…]

> For me to adjust letterspacing, would make all
> the letters closer or farther apart at once

I call that "tracking".

If you use "kerning" to mean -what I'm calling-
letterspacing, then what do you call my kerning? :-)

But it's not really a matter of wrong/right, just terminological convention.

hhp

[Member Mar…]

I think it's funny they chose Caslon to represent Italy. Oh, I get it! It's italic! :-/

[Member Wil…]

I don't think the terminology for spacing is totally fixed. There are different things you can do in different applications to adjust the space between letters. In FontLab you can set the side bearings--their distance from the extreme left and right of the black. You can also specify kerning: the further adjustment of specific pairs. In InDesign you can globally increase or decrease space between letters--tracking. And you can adjust spacing between specific letters--kerning. As I understand it, in Quark Express, you can also globally adjust pairs, such as AV.

In adjusting the spacing of a title people usually say 'kerning' but whichever way you slice it it's a species of spacing.

[Member Bru…]

What makes kerning good is that it is visually consistent, be it tight, wide, or in between. It should also be appropriate to the application--kerning for an outdoor board must be wider than for a brochure you're holding two feet from you face.

Ron Arnholm (studied under Rand at Yale), designer of Legacy and Legacy Sans was my typography teacher at the University of Georgia. Not only did he have us squint, but he had us look at the type upside, backward, and upside down and backward. That practice has served me well.

[Member ken…]

"Kerning" is the manual adjustment of space between two individual letters. The overall spacing of a word or title or whatever is, well, the overall "spacing."

So, for instance, in the comment Bruce just made (and not to pick on Bruce in particular, just by way of example), I would say, "spacing for an outdoor board must be wider than for a brochure you're holding two feet from your face."

So, what is good kerning? Good kerning is that kerning which makes spacing visually consistent (as Bruce also said, basically). Wat is "visually consistent"? Ahh, well now, there you get into the realm of some subjectivity.

If a typeface is spaced well, and depending upon the combination of letters under examination, a title setting might not need any "kerning" at all. If the spacing of the face is overall consistent and even, but too loose or too tight for the particular application, then that setting might need overall "tracking" or "letterspacing," positive or negative (i.e., adding or subtracting, overall) but no individual futzing (i.e., "kerning").

-- K.

[Member Era…]

Thanks all for your helpful posts. Some good tips in there too!

Bruce and Kent makes a good point, maybe the designers didn't expect such scrutiny over their letterspacing within the 5 seconds that they were on screen.

Little do they know young, confused and kerned-out designers come watch movies too...

[Member hra…]

T-shirt: "I'M ALL KERNED OUT"

hhp

[Member Cli…]

Kerning/letter-spacing is something that conscientious typographers/designers will always struggle over, because there are multiple approaches that can be taken.

With typefaces that have relatively heavy thin-strokes, it generally works well to try to visually balance the space on each side of the characters and to try to have the inter-character space throughout the text to appear more-or-less even.

On the other hand, when fonts have very light thin-strokes (as in the Sienna Italy sample above), it becomes necessary to also take into account the visual space WITHIN the characters, as well as the space on either side of them.

To further complicate things, you can choose to focus primarily on the negative space around the characters or you can draw an imaginary line down the center of each character and try to visually balance the space on each side of the character (sometimes called "optical letter-spacing"). Strange to say, both approaches produce text that appears even spaced, but with difference spacing -- and those who prefer one approach will generally not care for the results of the other approach.

The result of all this is that even when you try to carefully kern your type, you can be certain of never satisfying everyone -- but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't make every effort to do so.

[Member Cli…]

PLEASE IGNORE MY PREVIOUS POST, WHICH DOESN'T MAKE MUCH SENSE UNLESS CLARIFIED WITH SOME ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS THAT I HAD IN MY MIND, BUT FAILED TO SPELL OUT IN THE TEXT. HERE IS A REVISED (A SLIGHTLY EXPLADED VERSION):

Kerning/letter-spacing is something that conscientious typographers & designers, as well as type designers & typesetting system programmers will always struggle over, because there are various approaches that can be taken.

When a typographer/designer is working with a line or two of display copy and is using typefaces that have relatively heavy thin-strokes, it generally works well to try to visually balance the space on each side of the characters and to try to have the inter-character space throughout the text to appear more-or-less even.

On the other hand, when fonts have very light thin-strokes (as in the Sienna Italy sample above), it becomes necessary to also take into account the visual space WITHIN the characters, as well as the space on either side of them.

What to do with the vast array of fonts that fall in the middle, is where the art of kerning, and the individual taste of the typographers/designer comes in.

Somewhat congruently, when a type designer is setting up the overall kerning for a font, or a typesetting system programmer is devising the kerning algorithm that will output large blocks of text, he or she can choose either to focus primarily on the negative space around the characters or to draw an imaginary line down the center of each character and try to visually balance the space on each side of the character (sometimes called “optical letter-spacing”). Both approaches produce text that appears fairly evenly spaced, even though the resulting spacing is somewhat different — and those who prefer one approach will generally not care for the results of the other.

The end result of all this is that even when you try to carefully kern your type, you can be never be certain of satisfying everyone — but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make every effort to do so.

[Member ger…]

i don't understand why hrant is constantly trying to tell everyone to call this letterspacing.

everywhere i have ever heard or read, kerning is the spacing between specific individual letters and tracking is the general spacing between multiple letters

no disrespect meant to hrant, who is obviously a way better typographer than i am; i have just never heard letter-spacing defined like this before. i would maybe interchange letter-spacing with my definition of tracking (ie a line of text, with multiple words), but not kerning

[Member hra…]

You should have heard the discussions
about the meaning of "readability"! :-)

I just think my scheme is more sensical, more versatile.
Basically because -like I said- if you use "kerning" to
mean the spacing between glyphs that a typographer does
in a setting, what do you call the activity that a type
designer does in a font? Since "tracking" is the standard
term in apps to mean the overall tightness/looseness of a
setting, we have "letterspacing" in between the other two
terms, and it might as well fill that in-between role, no?

Or I guess we could overload the term "kerning", relying on
context. But then wouldn't "tracking" become redundant?

hhp

[Member ger…]

if you use “kerning” to
mean the spacing between glyphs that a typographer does
in a setting, what do you call the activity that a type
designer does in a font?

i call that kerning as well. manually adjusting the kerning is a setting is merely "tweaking" the original as far as i'm concerned

[Member ger…]

i'm not sure who you're directing that too, mark, but i agree with you 100% (if you were directing that at me, i did not word my thoughts very clearly at all)

[Member Mar…]

Your definition of kerning is too broad and at odds with its traditional meaning. In developing fonts, kerning is used to correct pairs of characters for which the standard spacing is not sufficient. These pairs are exceptions to the normal spacing of a font.

Check out these screen snaps from Adobe Illustrator:

The first image shows that this text is tracked 60 units and that the kerning is set to "auto", meaning that the font's built-in kerning pairs will be used. The second image shows that the "T" and "e" are kerned -71 units. In other words, this text has both tracking and kerning applied. If you call them both kerning, you'll go crazy trying to figure out what's going on.

Spacing is simply the normal spacing of a font.

Kerning is an exception to normal spacing between two characters.

Tracking alters the spacing of a range of characters, separate from and in addition to any kerning between pairs in that range.

[Member inn…]

I love you Mark.

[Member ken…]

> if you use “kerning” to mean the spacing between glyphs that a typographer does in a setting, what do you call the activity that a type designer does in a font?

Hrant, in my opinion, they are essentially the same thing. Both are kerning. Both activities, whether by type designer in the course of developing the font or by the typographer in the course of fine-tuning a particular setting, are "kerning" -- that is, they are creating pair-specific exceptions/overrides to the basic spacing of the glyphs.

The only significant difference is that one is done at a systemic level, the other is situational.

When the type designer does it, the result is the set of kerning pairs built into the font. When the typographer does it, then you could call it "manual kerning."

-- K.

[Member cut…]

When the type designer does it, the result is the set of kerning pairs built into the font. When the typographer does it, then you could call it “manual kerning.”

You could also distinguish them as "pre-consumer" and "post-consumer" kerning. That's probably not a good generic label but it works as a concept.