Kerning is the space between two individual letters. Unless you are a professional designer and trained in typography, or have a degree in design, kerning may be a word you have never heard of before because it's not a word commonly used at the dinner table. If you are not a designer you probably don't care about what kerning is in the first place and wouldn't recognize it until you saw bad kerning, for example, in a movie poster or in a store front. Even when you do come across bad kerning, because undoubtedly you do come across it fairly often, you probably don't even know that what you're seeing is kerning. However, by just looking at the piece of work you know that something is wrong with the design. This is because bad kerning is something that doesn't go unnoticed.
Kerning is everywhere that you see type - in books, movie posters, road signs, products and even in your text messages - so its no wonder that bad kerning is so common. If you have so much of something there's bound to be mistakes. For the most part if you are not told that kerning exists you won't notice it at all and you wouldn't really care if you saw good kerning. Before I was educated as a designer, before my first typography class, I never noticed these defects in books that I read or the homework assignments that I typed. Now, however, I see kerning clearly and am distracted by poorly produced typesetting.
I didn't notice how irritated the eye could get when the "t" and the "h" were too close together on a page and how the letters "w" and "a" are never quite close enough in words like "war" and "want." Now, out of habit, every time I read a book I look at the kerning, and occasionally I will circle these mistakes, looking for someone to blame for the poorly designed layouts. It is argued that kerning is only looked at and meticulously worked upon in larger projects and not in books because of the time it takes. But no matter what the project someone must be held responsible for kerning because otherwise these mistakes will continue to happen and continue to agitate the eye. Placing blame however can be difficult: should we blame the designer or the company that commissions the work? Or do we blame the software the designer uses? Kerning is already preprogramed in software to judge the correct distance between each letter; this is called auto-kerning. Kerning pairs are already preprogramed in software. Each font has its own kerning table which can consist of fifty or a hundred or more combinations. These tables are set to allow for specific degrees of spacing between each letter which allows for the many letter combinations that form our words.
Common letter combinations that produce a too wide of an inter letter are W, Y, V. T. L. The larger the font size, the more you notice the gap. A most commonly criticized word is "WAR," as you can notice the angle of the "W" and the angle in the "A" seem to repel each other making it appear as if the "AR" is falling off of the "W." This example is found in "WATER" also. However here you see two things: not only are the "W" and the "A" repelling each other but the "A" and "T" are also fighting against each other. The letter "O" is also a nuisance; because of its width the letter is always seen as being a singular letter separated from the rest of the letters near it, even when it is placed in the center of a word.
Bad kerning doesn't just interrupt words but it also interrupts the spacing between each word and before and after a punctuation. These failures to kern between punctuation can cause what designers call rivers. Rivers are empty spaces or gaps that draw your eye down a page and distract you. Some times these rivers can become so bad that they create optical illusions.
Reading through this paper you probably have noticed several kerning mishaps, how could you not? I purposely allowed for this to provoke you to pick out the bad kerning and see how apparent it is. Though it is irritating the degree is not sufficient to prevent you from being bale to read the words correctly. Secondly, since I have already explained what kerning is you will probably notice it more often, whether you want to or not. Since a lot of mundane inconsistencies go unnoticed it is only when something is acknowledged that you start noticing it everywhere. See how many bad kerning incidents you can locate through the reset of this article. Also, next time you read a book notice the kerning in the title page and the text and analyze your reaction to seeing bad kerning. Books are a common place to find bad kerning because the text is so extensive that kerning each individual letter would take perhaps days or weeks to carefully weed through and that is just time most business will not pay for.
It is irritating when I open a design book about typography and find that the kerning has gone unchecked. Reading through my textbook for a typography course I found it hypocritical that the author had criticized the misuse of kerning when that very book had poor kerning. Here was a book, meant to teach about these aesthetics, failing to follow its own rule. This was a time when I wanted to circle each "th" and every "wa" and go to someone and point out the irony of these mistakes.
Terrible consequences arise from bad kerning mishaps including offensive material. Offending someone is something a designer does not want to do especially in the case of promoting something or advertising a product or store. For a store in New Port Ritchie, Florida, a designer neglected to kern the letters in the store name carefully which resulted in something undesirable. The store front was supposed to read "Megaflicks" because it is a video store. Unfortunately for the store owner that is not what they got. Instead the sign reads as "Megafucks" - hinting at a different type of store. A mistake like this can be only looked at in disbelief because of the time it takes to design a store front. You would assume that this typo would have been seen by someone somewhere along the line of production.
A movie poster discussed in many forums on kerning is the I Am Legend movie poster. In this poster the "L" and the "D" are separated from the "egend" not only because of its size but through kerning. This makes it difficult to read as "legend." The "egend" looks like its own word hanging in its own space unconnected to the "L" and the "D." The beginning and ending letters seem to be acting as a support for the "egend" and not as a part of the actual word. This was an intentional kerning choice so claiming it as a bad kerning situation is debatable. It was a bad choice because of the reading of the word but at the same time it makes an interesting design.
Designers work painstakingly and endlessly on their work, which begs the question: Why does bad kerning exist? Could it just be carelessness? Carelessness is hard to believe because designers are fairly meticulous, and bad kerning, beyond a doubt, is noticeable. Looking at a project as much and for as long as a designer does it can't be pure carelessness. Then it must be laziness; but this is also hard to fathom because again a designer considers each work their "baby." Why would a designer carefully place every element just right and then decide to be lazy with regards to something that can be so vital to the finished design? It bothers me that a designer can leave out kerning corrections when doing so can harmonize the final product and make it more appealing to the eye. Perhaps it is because good kerning goes unnoticed so designers say "why bother?" Or maybe it's because people are not well educated regarding its benefits.
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