Tracking and Letterspacing: The Details That Define Typography

Tracking is the adjustment of letter spacing across a range of text. It's different from kerning, which adjusts the space between specific letter pairs. Tracking affects everything uniformly. Used well, it's one of the most powerful tools in a typographer's kit. Used badly, it's the signature mistake that makes amateur typography instantly recognizable.

The Basic Principle

Type set at large display sizes usually needs its tracking reduced. The optical illusion of large type is that letter spacing appears wider than it actually is. Letters that look appropriately spaced at 12pt will look loose and disconnected at 72pt.

Type set at very small sizes usually needs its tracking increased slightly. At small sizes, letters can crowd together optically, reducing legibility. Opening up the tracking fractionally improves readability.

All-caps type almost always needs increased tracking. Uppercase letterforms were designed to work within running text with lowercase, and when you use them in isolation, the spacing feels tight. Opening up all-caps settings by 5–15% of the type size is standard practice.

The Mistakes I See Constantly

Excessive tracking on display type. I see this everywhere. Headlines set with tracking so open that the words barely hold together as units. This is particularly common with sans-serif type in luxury branding, where wide spacing has become a shorthand for "premium." Used with restraint, it can work. Used as a default setting, it looks like an attempt at sophistication that hasn't been thought through.

Tight tracking on body copy. Body text set slightly tighter than the font default. It makes paragraphs look denser and more "designed." It also makes them harder to read. Body copy tracking should stay within a narrow range around the font default.

Tracked type that ignores the font's built-in spacing. Fonts have built-in spacing that's part of their design. A typeface with tight default spacing and a typeface with open default spacing will look very different when you apply the same tracking adjustment to both. Always evaluate tracking relative to the font's base, not as an absolute value.

Tracking for All-Caps

The standard guidance is to open up all-caps tracking, and it's correct. But how much? It depends on:

The typeface. Geometric sans-serifs often need more tracking than humanist faces. Condensed types need more than wide types.

The size. Larger sizes generally need more tracking adjustment than smaller sizes. A 6pt all-caps caption might need only 50 units. A 96pt all-caps headline might need 200 units.

The color value. Heavier weights need more tracking than lighter weights. The additional ink on the page makes letters optically crowd each other more.

My starting point is usually 100 units (0.1em) for normal all-caps setting, and I adjust from there visually.

Testing Your Tracking Decisions

The test I use: step back from the screen until you can no longer read individual letters. At that distance, what does the tracked type look like? Even spacing across all letters, with words reading as units? Or does it look like scattered letters with no cohesion?

Tracking done well is invisible. The reader never notices it. They just notice that the type is easy to read or that it has appropriate presence. Tracking done badly calls attention to itself. Your eye catches on the gaps or feels squeezed by the tightness.

Get the tracking right and everything else falls into place.