It is possible for a novice to do more harm than good, with a result that’s worse than no kerning at all. Expert typesetters know what they are doing. When kerning manually, searching for letter pairs that are the worst offenders will help make the task more efficient. If kerning is important, using a desktop publisher with automatic kerning is highly convenient. Manually kerning every word carefully in the interior file would be a tedious process. However, the more people read electronic text without kerning (although kerning is performed on some web-based text, for example), the more they are accustomed to not reading kerned text.Ī book may have a hundred thousand words, whereas the cover only has a few. When the interior is properly kerned, the design of the book offers a better reading experience and may even be easier on the eyes. The text inside the book is important, too, but the font on the cover is usually quite large (so that it can be read in the thumbnail image), such that improper kerning tends to stand out more. If the shopper is thinking, “Something seems funny here,” this factors into that first impression. Kerning is most important on the book cover. You may not know what it is if you’re not knowledgeable about typography, yet you know that something seems funny. Even if you know nothing about kerning, if the letter-spacing is off, your eye realizes that something isn’t quite right. The eye can tell when the font isn’t kerned properly. These are adjustable, too:ĭoes it look right to your eye now? It’s better, but for perfectionists, there is still a little room to work with.
See how kerning the WA pair improves the word WATER:īut it still isn’t perfect: It looks like there is too much space between AT, while TE seems crowded. That is, look at the two red lines in the middle of the picture above and how they line up with the two letters. When the WA pair is kerned, the space between the letters is decreased such that the end of each letter without the serif matches up with the end of the serif of the other letter. Note that the font above (Georgia) has a serif (that small line at the ends of each letter). Through kerning, the space between the W and A can be decreased, as in the following picture. The W and A blocks force a minimum separation, unless kerning is applied. The process of typing generally creates each letter in its own little block. The W is slanting toward the A, which slants away from the W. Inconsistent spacing between letters arises from the shape of the letters. If you look closely, you will see a noticeable gap in the pair WA, while the letters TE are nearly touching. For example, consider the word WATER written in uppercase letters. Kerning is the art of adjusting the spacing between individual letters in order to improve visual appeal.Ĭertain pairs of letters can be especially problematic. The spacing between letters sometimes doesn’t look quite right to the eye.
0 kommentar(er)
