Long overdue kerning homework

And so - kerning. Around two weeks ago the Vice Chancellor of the Account Planning School of the Web set me the following assignment.

Here's your chance to educate the rest of us. I would like a really detailed explanation of why that's true ('enjoying' is a difficult word to kern). With lots of examples. Show your working.

I've heard about kerning all my life, kind of understood it, in the way that people think they kind of understand relativity. But I'd like to actually understand it.

What is kerning?
I think it's a good idea to start with a definition of kerning. In a nutshell, kerning is the act of changing the spacing between individual letters.

Or to be a bit for more formal answers.com says "In proportional spacing, the tightening of space between letters to create a visually appealing flow to the text. Letter combinations, such as WA, MW and TA, are routinely kerned for better appearance."

There is such a thing as the Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers and they say this:

(NB: Kerning is different from tracking which is making the same alteration to all the letters in one word.  That's important because a lot of people think they're the same. They are not.)

Bad kerning
Normally kerning is only noticeable when it's done badly. Like here:

or here

In the mid nineties people used to say that print was dead. (Or if not dead, dying at least. A bit like people keep telling me that advertising is dead. Sorrell must be having sleepless nights.) The same people also used to say that the grid is dead and all the old typographic rules were redundant. This came about largely because the Apple Mac meant that you could try, literally, hundreds of different arrangements of type in a few seconds. You see, you couldn't do this with old, big, metal blocks of type.

Neville Brody and David Carson are the two most famous designers from this era, Carson even wrote a book about it.

See also the Carson designed Raygun, any issue. I'm telling you all this because this era (and by implication the Apple Mac) is largely responsible for a lot of the bad kerning you see today. The craft has been lost.

Why kern at all?
More people probably 'track' rather than 'kern' these days, because the software makes this easier. Originally you would kern something to make the legibility better, nowadays I suspect that most people kern so they can fit more words on a page. If you make the kerning a little tighter on a paragraph of say 200 words, you might be able to squeeze another 10 or 20 words in. This can be vital.

Why 'enjoying' is a hard word to kern
I probably should have said that enjoying is a word that needs kerning, rather than it's a word that is hard to kern. (Wikipedia use the example WAR which is better.) Let's go back to what I was doing when I wrote that. I had just typed the word 'enjoying' in Times New Roman in Photoshop. Here's how it looked:

The software spaces this automatically to the lowest common denominator. And it's probably fine for most people. It's certainly fine for body text (the 10pt stuff). But for big, display text, in my opinion, it's not good enough.

We need to mess around with the "joyi" bit. Here goes.

That's better. But the O and the Y and the I still leave awkward spaces. Can you see? And that is why 'enjoying' is a hard word to kern.

Good kerning
Good kerning not only looks great but aids legibility (which is linked to usability, and usability is a good thing).

One outlet where I see good kerning everyday, used to aid legibility and save space, is the tabloid press. (The only problem with the tabloid press is that it's really hard to find a front page that won't offend someone, somewhere. This was the least offensive one I could find).

Can you see how they used kerning on that 'Killer Flip Flops' headline?

I also raided my little design library at home to try and find examples of great kerning.

That's not such an easy thing to do, it's a bit like a surgeon looking for examples of great stitching. Anyway, here are some good examples illustrated with bad photos.

Here's some pages from a lovely book by/about Michael Jordan. (There's loads of good typography in general in this book.)

Neville Brody actually did some great kerning.

Pentagram, of course, are very good at kerning.

On another note and with reference to Professors Davies' other course my typography teacher on my Foundation course was facinated by how the kerning was always of a good standard on UK road signs.

With massive thanks to Gaetan Lee.

I can now understand what he meant.

Comments

[Nathan Miller]

Good job on the homework, I'll give you an A- on that. Sorry, I'm only familiar with the american grading system. The problem is that although typography books present good examples they rarely if ever get into the philosophy and rules - sometimes meant to be broken - in regards to typography and kerning. They miss the meat of the matter the, what, when, and why of kerning. The single best resource that I've found which addresses this matter and a whole lot more to do with type is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Find it on Amazon and buy it, today.

[Ben]

I forgot to mention - the best book on typography is probably 'Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works' by Erik Spiekermann.

As the blurb says, "Frederic Goudy, American type designer, once said, "Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep." To most people, this comment only adds to the perception that type inhabits a mysterious world with intricate terminology and elaborate rules."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0672485435/sr=8-2/qid=1155034052/ref=sr_1_2/202-0102679-7443065?ie=UTF8&s=gateway

[Mr. P.H. Colman]

What a delightful post.

[Mr R Davies]

Brilliant stuff. Many thanks for that.

Any chance you could now explain that golden ratio/section thing designers always go on about?

[Caspian]

Kerning is like mountain biking for me, you learnt it once but when actually rationalising what you are doing you can fall off. My tip is if the word looks odd kern it *heaps*, step back, and then take it back. Somehow it seems to fall into place.

[henry lambert]

cracking post. brilliantly written with some very pertinent examples.

[Chris]

Yes.

And yet good/bad kerning is also in the eye of the beholder.

Ask five type-aware designers and production artists to kern "enjoying" and you'll get five different results.

(E.g. to my eye your "joy" is inappropriately tight in relationship to your "enj" and "ing")

Some typographers focus on each individual space between letters. Others look at the entire word, or the word within the context of a headline or sentence. What you call an awkward space I call a visual guide to help my brain identify the word correctly in the shortest amount of time possible.

Which is why I'm not taken with your road sign example, because I expect few drivers passing it at 100km/hr are looking for the way to "Eads Court".

But perhaps for that bit of confusion I should blame the type designer, rather than the typesetter.

[Ben]

Chris, you've reminded me of some Pentagram stuff I found but forgot to post.

I don't want people to think that kerning just means making the spaces tighter, and so I found some good examples where the type had extra spacing but still looked great. I must find those and upload them.

When I used the example of newspaper headlines "a visual guide to help my brain identify the word correctly" was exactly what I meant.

[thunk.]

Chris,
Your comment about the type on the road sign reminded me of an exhibition about information design which I think was at the Design Museum a few years ago. I managed to find an article which mentions sloppy use of Calvert Kinnear's system since his death.

Just down the road from me is a school patrol sign, which has been rather spectacularly letterspaced. I have a feeling that this is the work of whoever produced that particular sign, rather than Calvert or Kinnear...

article: http://www.designmuseum.org/design/jock-kinneir-margaret-calvert
sign: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mandatorythinking/211609196/

[Ben]

Thunk, that's a very badly kerned sign.

[Chris]

Thunk, thanks for the article.
The sign is, indeed, spectacularly bad.

[jmocity]

the dude is right: the best kerning never gets noticed, because it's not supposed to. besides, the examples he showed of good kerning were showing good tracking. and the other dude is right, too: kerning loosely can sometimes have a dramatic effect, often much more powerful than tight kerning, especially in one word that normally would disappear on the page. and the other dude is right, too: it's hard to express to people our deep passion for working very hard on trying to make something almost entirely unnoticeable (like good kerning).

[russell]

I don't really understand all this. But I get these sense this is a man with a commitment to good kerning: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=84211932&blogID=160567063

[Charles Edward Frith]

Whats great about this post is I'm reminded of Robert de Niet, a talented friend and designer (and my University lecturer at one point) giving me a copy of Emigre magazine which was about fonts and I couldn't believe that the subject could be so blinky blimey intellectual.

I've always had a healthy interest since then, even a few friendly scraps (Paul in Phuket & Ben in Bangkok just last week!). Any planners would do well to immerse themselves in this discipline that embraces every facet of design. Past present and future.

[Blip]

Great, comprehensive post. Enjoying especially the enjoying bit (felt that I had to be the stupid one with the pun). I started working with design with the first Macs and I remember that condensing typefaces 30% was then usual behaviour, just because it could be done and tested easily.

Back to enjoying. When you first commented on the difficulty of kerning the word, I tried it myself and thought, what the hell, some pairs, no big deal. I thank you for making me pause and look again. Now I see what you meant.

But at the same time I think that anything further than the kerning you did becomes typeface design. The o-y ligature, anyone?

Finishing, agreeing on kerning as a matter of taste (and anal designers): the "njo" would seem too "chunky" for me.

[kevin kirkwood]

I can say it's very consistent of you in writing such complicated issue.