The Craft of Kerning Display Type

Kerning is the adjustment of space between specific pairs of characters. At body text sizes, automatic kerning is adequate — the type engine handles it well enough, and the eye integrates small irregularities into the reading flow. At display sizes, automatic kerning is almost never good enough. The irregularities that disappear in running text become architectural at headline scale.

Manual kerning of display type is one of the most time-intensive and least celebrated crafts in typography. It also has a significant effect on the quality of the final work.

What Bad Kerning Looks Like

The eye perceives spacing optically, not metrically. Two letters 50 units apart don't look equally spaced if one pair is two open forms facing each other (like AV or VA) and another pair is two closed forms with parallel sides (like HH).

The AV pair creates a visual canyon — the angled strokes point away from each other, creating a large area of apparent white space between them. The HH pair creates a dense cluster. Set at the same numerical tracking, they look radically different.

Bad kerning at display size looks like the type has uneven rhythm — some letters too tight, some too open — without the viewer necessarily being able to identify why. It looks unfinished, like the designer trusted the machine and didn't check the work.

My Kerning Process

For display type at poster or headline scale:

1. Set the word in the typeface at display size, at normal or slightly open tracking
2. Squint at the word to find the pairs that look irregular — the conspicuous gaps and the overcrowded pairs
3. Work pair by pair, adjusting in small increments and stepping back to evaluate each time
4. Zoom out after each round of adjustments and look at the word as a whole shape
5. Repeat until the rhythm feels even

The test of good kerning is whether the word looks like one unified shape with consistent internal rhythm, not like a string of individual letters.

All-Caps Headlines

All-caps display type has different kerning requirements than mixed-case. Capital letters often have complex interactions — especially A, V, W, T, and Y, which have diagonal strokes that create visual space on one side and visual compression on the other.

I increase overall tracking for all-caps setting first, then kern individual pairs. The wider tracking gives me more room to work and produces a generally open rhythm appropriate for all-caps.

The Squint Test

My primary evaluation tool for kerning quality is the squint test. Squinting at a piece of display type reduces it to gray tones and blurs the individual letterforms into a textural impression. The spacing irregularities that aren't visible at full focus become obvious as inconsistent gray density when squinting.

An evenly kerned headline creates an even gray ribbon at low focus. Poorly kerned type creates a ribbon with light and dark patches — the visual signature of uneven spacing.

When Fonts Have Poor Kerning Tables

Some typefaces have poorly constructed kerning tables — they rely on auto-kerning that doesn't account well for certain character pairs. I note these when I encounter them and either manually kern every headline set in them or choose a different typeface for contexts where kerning quality matters.

A beautiful typeface with poor kerning tables is a liability in display work.