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What do you mean by kerning between letters?
Kerning refers to the amount of space between two letters (or other characters: Numbers, punctuation, etc.) and the process of adjusting that space to avoid awkward-looking gaps between your letters and improve legibility.
How does font size affect the kerning of text?
The size you set your font at will influence your kerning. In other words, letters often appear to interact differently at various point sizes — if you set a headline at 48 pt., kern it, and then later need to change it to 24 pt., your careful kerning work will likely be undone.
When do you use tracking instead of kerning?
Rather than adjusting one pair of letters like kerning, tracking applies consistent spacing to all the letters in a selection of text—you might adjust a single word, a sentence, or whole paragraphs or pages at once. If any tracking is necessary for your design, you’ll want to do that before kerning.
When do you need to use kerning in typography?
Kerning may seem like an unnecessary or unimportant detail, but adding it as a quick extra step at the end of your design workflow can make a big difference in helping typography-focused projects look polished. Kerning will be most important for large, highly visible text like typographic logos or headlines.
How are kerning units expressed in font units?
The number is expressed in font units, one unit being a certain fraction of an em (one em is the type size currently used). Different fonts may use different units, but common values are 1000 and 2048 units/em. Thus, for 1000 units/em, a kerning value of 15 means an increase in character spacing by 0.015 of the current type size.
Where does the word kern come from in printing?
The glyph on the right is kerned to overlap the character following it (glyphs are mirrored for printing). The source of the word kern is from the French word carne, meaning “projecting angle, quill of a pen”. The French term originated from the Latin cardo, cardinis, meaning “hinge”.
What do you need to know about kerning in fonts?
Making changes to your font’s leading and tracking can impact the way that readers will perceive the space between your letters, so you’ll need to take care of those before you begin kerning. Taking care of these two steps first will make the kerning process much easier. Leading refers to the vertical spacing between two lines.
Which is an example of a bad kerning?
These kinds of letters create a lot of negative space, which the eye can sometimes mistake for bad kerning. These are the kinds of letters that can allow your creativity to come out and play. For example, consider the FedEx logo, which takes advantage of the negative space caused by that problematic “X,” turning it into a hidden arrow.
What’s the best way to Kern a letter?
Since kerning relies on trusting your eye instead of a unit of measurement, you have to learn to train your eye to look for the right amount of spacing. One way to do this is to establish a visual standard through the space between straight and curved letters.