An introduction to kerning.

Explore the typographic art of kerning.

Design is full of detail-level concepts that matter more than their superficial simplicity would suggest. Kerning is a great example. When used effectively, kerning can be a powerful tool to influence aesthetic and communication through type. It’s a tool that, when used well, won’t be noticed by the average reader.

“If you start to look for it,” says designer Madeline DeCotes, “you’ll realize there’s so much more to letters than you thought possible.”

What is kerning?

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,” explains DeCotes. “The 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?’”

Determining when to use kerning.

There are a number of situations where you’ll want to manually kern your 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 you consider your 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,” DeCotes says. “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.”

Fonts downloaded from the internet for free can be problematic for designers, as their default kerning (also called metric kerning) is not set professionally. Designer Nick Escobar notes that free fonts are usually produced by amateurs. “They often have pretty bad kerning, so you have to go in and manually adjust it.”

As a general rule of thumb, Escobar says, “The better drawn a font is, and the more seasoned the artist is, the less you have to adjust the kerning.”

Kerning lessons to help you build your skills.

Learning to kern is all about developing your eye through practice and repetition, but drawing on expert knowledge is a crucial part of advancing in your typography journey. Behance and the Adobe YouTube channel are great resources for learning more and getting inspiration from other artists, while articles can provide you with technical know-how. Explore these tutorials and begin developing your skills: