Get creative and you could find new ways to control the look, feel, or even the meaning of your type. The takeaway? Use the flexibility kerning offers to your advantage. But if they weren’t so tightly kerned together, it wouldn’t be as bold or impactful.” “If you look at the classic ‘Just Do It’ ads, you’ll notice the letters are kerned so tightly it’s obviously not the default font. He offers the example of the FedEx logo, with its hidden arrow formed by the negative space between the letters.ĭeCotes points to Nike as another example of intentional kerning. “If you want to create fun shapes or energy in your logo, you can mess up the kerning and start to see how letterforms interact,” says designer Jimmy Presler. In these mediums, kerning becomes a way to influence the look and tone of your design. The lack of set rules for kerning becomes the designer’s biggest advantage when working on more creative applications with type, such as logo design or editorial work. “They often have pretty bad kerning, so you have to go in and manually adjust it.”Īs a general rule of thumb, Escobar says, “The better drawn a font is, and the more seasoned the artist is, the less you have to adjust the kerning.” Designer Nick Escobar notes that free fonts are usually produced by amateurs. “People don’t realize anytime they see giant text, whether it’s on a poster, a billboard, or a website, headline fonts have probably been thoughtfully kerned.”įonts downloaded from the internet for free can be problematic for designers, as their default kerning (also called metric kerning) is not set professionally. “If you’re not a designer, it’s not something you think about,” DeCotes says. Designing a logo demands that you consider your kerning for a variety of applications - signs, websites, mugs, and pencils are all possibilities - and a good designer will kern with these potential uses in mind. Logos are another example where a font’s automatic kerning may not cut it. If you enlarge the text size without manually shrinking the space between characters, you probably won’t like the results. This is because smaller text sizes need more space between letters to maintain legibility. Text that looks good at smaller point sizes, such as in a paragraph on a magazine page, may look awkward at larger sizes, like an article headline or a billboard. There are a number of situations where you’ll want to manually kern your type.
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