The Craft of Kerning: Letter by Letter

Kerning — the adjustment of space between individual letter pairs — is the most granular level of typographic refinement. It's the kind of work that's invisible when done correctly and quietly wrong when it isn't. Most designers use automatic kerning and call it done. For body text at reading sizes, that's usually fine. For display type, headlines, logotypes, and any text that's being examined at large scale, automatic kerning is often a starting point that needs manual intervention.

Why Automatic Kerning Isn't Enough

Type designers build kerning tables into their fonts — pairs of letters with spacing adjustments that override the default sidebearings. These tables cover common pairs (AV, WA, To, and hundreds of others) and they're the reason modern typefaces kern as well as they do automatically.

But kerning tables are general solutions. They're designed for the full range of uses at the full range of sizes. At display scale — where letterforms are examined closely, where optical effects are magnified, where the viewer's eye finds irregularities that would be invisible at text size — the general solution often isn't precise enough.

Optical kerning (which uses the letterform shapes to calculate spacing) is better than metric kerning for display work but still not a substitute for manual adjustment.

The Visual Standard

The standard I kern to: the apparent area of white space between each pair of letters should feel equal. Not geometrically equal — optically equal. Because different letterform shapes create different space shapes (the space between V and A is a triangular void; the space between H and I is a rectangular one), the geometric spacing required to create optically equal space varies pair by pair.

I evaluate kerning by looking at letter pairs in sequence, checking whether any gap feels wider or narrower than its neighbors. The process is iterative: adjust, look, adjust again.

Common Problem Pairs

Some pairs are almost universally problematic: AV, VA, WA, AW, To, Ta, Te, Ty, We, and any combination where a diagonal stroke (V, W, A, Y) is adjacent to an open letter. Combinations of capitals and lowercase with mixed shapes also frequently need attention in headline settings.

Round-to-round combinations (oo, oc, ce) often need slight tightening because the curved letterforms create an optical gap even when spacing is geometrically correct.

The Zoom-Out Test

My workflow: kern at large zoom, then zoom out and look at the whole word or headline. Problems that are invisible at close range can be obvious at distance. I adjust, zoom, repeat until the word has even rhythm at both viewing distances.

For logotypes and display headlines, I also test on printed output rather than relying solely on screen. The eye reads print differently from screen, and kerning decisions that look right at screen resolution sometimes reveal problems in print.

When to Stop

Kerning can be pursued to diminishing returns, spending an hour on adjustments that no one — including trained typographers — would notice. I stop when the overall rhythm feels even and no individual pair calls attention to itself.

Kerning that's "close enough" for display type isn't close enough. But perfect at the cost of hours on every project isn't sustainable. Develop your eye, work efficiently, and know when you've reached the right standard.