Kerning: The Detail That Separates Designers

There's a point in a designer's development where they start seeing bad kerning everywhere. On restaurant signs, in advertisements, in logos of major companies. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. This is either a gift or a curse depending on your temperament.

Kerning is the adjustment of space between individual letter pairs. It's distinct from tracking (overall letter spacing across a word or block of text) and leading (vertical line spacing). Kerning is surgical — pair by pair, the space between each combination of letters adjusted until the whole word feels optically even.

Why Auto Kerning Isn't Enough

Every professional typeface ships with kerning tables — built-in spacing adjustments for common letter pairs. AV, WA, Te, ry — pairs where the geometric shapes of adjacent letters create optical gaps that need to be manually compensated for. The typeface's kerning tables handle the most obvious cases.

But in display-size typography — headlines, logo type, poster type, anything large — the kerning tables aren't enough. The larger the type, the more visible the spacing irregularities. What looks acceptable at 12pt is glaring at 120pt.

I kern every headline and display typeface setting above roughly 40pt. Without exception. This is the practice.

How I Kern

The process I use: set the text, zoom out until it's small enough that you're reading the overall texture rather than individual letters, then look for spots where your eye snags — where the rhythm breaks. Zoom in, fix the problem pair, zoom out again.

There's also the squint test: squint at the word until the letterforms are blurry. You're now seeing optical density rather than shape. Any gap that appears relative to its neighbors under squinting is a kerning problem.

For logotype and wordmark work, I kern in Illustrator with the type outlined, adjusting letter positions directly. I can be more precise this way than relying on kerning number inputs, and I can see the final shapes rather than the abstract letter spacing metric.

Tight vs. Open Kerning

There's no single right answer for overall letter spacing. It depends on the typeface, the application, and the feeling the work needs to convey. Tight, locked tracking communicates intensity and intimacy — the letters are close together, the word is unified. Open, airy tracking communicates luxury, calm, authority.

The error to avoid is unintentional spacing — letting the default sit because no decision was made. Default is not neutral. It's whatever the typeface designer intended for body text use, which is usually not optimized for display or headline work.

The Payoff

Good kerning is invisible. No one will point to a well-kerned headline and say "the spacing is perfect." They'll just feel that the headline looks right. Bad kerning is very visible once you can see it, and once a client or art director can see it, it's all they see.

Kerning is the work no one praises and everyone eventually notices when it's wrong. That's reason enough to do it right every time.