Kerning and Tracking Question

[follicle]

I have a question regarding the rules of kerning (a question my instructors never covered, but I should have asked). When is kerning necessary? Always, sometimes? I understand that kerning should be adjusted in areas where characters create "odd" spaces such as the letter "T". Should kerning always be adjusted in elements such as headlines and logos?

What about tracking? If the paragraph's character spacing is adjusted as a whole, wouldn't that leave those "odd" spaces in tact or would you have to go through the copy and kern every odd space?

Sorry for my ignorance, but it's really the only subject I'm still learning. Thanks!

[tZ]

if you want to be a diehard then theretically everything you do.

[patkennedy78]

If you want a hard and fast rule, Kern over 16pt. Anything lower than that kern at your pleasure.

I rarely track out a paragraph. I usually track in to fit in a confined space.

Hope that helps.

[mac.FINN]

Kerning should always be adjusted. I did a book for school where my professor had me go through the book and kern every letter.

Basically you want to achieve a good "colour" in your paragraphs (a nice solid grey without a lot of breaks). It's very important for Titles too. Look at the characters AVI. See how much space there is between the A and the V compared to the V and the I, that's bad kerning. The space between the characters should be visually equal.

You're right, just tracking text isn't enough; you'll need to kern too if you want a perfectly composed paragraph. However, tracking is a quick fix to kind of squish out large gaps and rivers if you don't have time to go and kern everything.

[follicle]

Thanks for the above replies!

Now I'm researching into Illustrator and Indesign and reading about Auto Kerning. From what I read, there are a few fonts that have automatic kerning settings built into them. I understand that a lot of fonts don't. So two more questions:

1) Should I take advantage of Auto kerning or should I always manually kern?

2) I notice that there are several letter combinations where letters must be kerned. Should I only kern those letters or should I look at the whole word and kern what's necessary.

Thanks!

[capezio]

I was taught to kern by turning text upside down and then kerning between letters. You are then not distracted by the letters/word but see it as a graphic element. Same as copying a drawing upside down

Also some fonts are monospaced i.e. each letter takes up the same amount of space (I think courier is one) as on a typewriter.

[mac.FINN]

1) In Indesign I always set my kerning to "optical". That way it automatically kerns the letters based on what you see, not what the computer tells it. But you'll still need to kern problem areas manually.

2) Unless you want to scrutinize over the entire body copy (which is very time consuming) just look at the text, if you see a space where the kerning is off, fix it.
Yes there are some character combos that always need to be kerned like VA WA To etc, but it's really up to your eyes.
Print out the copy in black and white and look at it upside down, find the spaces that way. Also, squint a little... your paragraph should look like a solid grey shape.

Now take into account that this is all time consuming and isn't always expected, but if you have extra time and want to really wow someone with typography (especially with lots of body copy) this is the way.

[follicle]

Once again, thank you for the replies. They have all been very helpful. I've been experimenting with Optical kerning in InDesign with pleasing results and turning the text upside down works miracles. Thanks again!

[Virgo Nightingale]

Like everyone's been saying, there are certain letter combos that won't look right until you kern them. Aside from the VA/WA examples, sometimes combos like 'ed' or 'es' need to be moved apart slightly, especially with certain serif fonts. Looking at your text upside down is a good idea, but one trick I was taught was to look at the letters three at a time and adjust until they feel balanced.

[budafist]

I always do headings, logos, quotations. Smaller stuff tends to take up too much time. I would if I could, but you have to pick your fights...ligatures are you friend too.

[Virgo Nightingale]

Not only would kerning the small stuff be time consuming, it would probably make you go completely nuts after a while. You might end up having nightmares about having to kern every word of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" within two hours while angry V's, A's, Y's, J's, L's and T's stab at you with exclamation points for messing with their respective natural states.

[budafist]

I dream about fonts sometimes...

[mac.FINN]

trust me Virgo... you do.

I mentioned I did a project where I kerned every individual character...it was a 16 page book. A reseach paper that I think was around 1500 words, and to make matters worse I kept changing it.

[MD]

I mentioned I did a project where I kerned every individual character...it was a 16 page book.
And in the end ... nobody noticed or cared ;)

You either have an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or a lot of free time on your hands. I would love to hear the conversation between you and a customer explaining how spending 5 billable hours adjusting the space between each individual letter is money well spent.

[CamarotaDesign]

^^ Thats a good point, I think when your doing run of the mill stuff you just have to say screw it, it just isnt worth it. Always kern headings and sub headings of course, and dont forget to use those ligatures.

[CamarotaDesign]

I dream about fonts sometimes...


The other night I had a nightmare that I was working on a design and I kept trying to make changes to it, but each time it would still look ugly. Over and over it was a never ending cycle of poor revisions.

[urstwile]

Kerning should always be adjusted. I did a book for school where my professor had me go through the book and kern every letter.

Basically you want to achieve a good "colour" in your paragraphs (a nice solid grey without a lot of breaks). It's very important for Titles too. Look at the characters AVI. See how much space there is between the A and the V compared to the V and the I, that's bad kerning. The space between the characters should be visually equal.

You're right, just tracking text isn't enough; you'll need to kern too if you want a perfectly composed paragraph. However, tracking is a quick fix to kind of squish out large gaps and rivers if you don't have time to go and kern everything.

Kerning SHOULD be adjusted where time is available to do so, however, this is one of the things that I wish InDesign had that Quark does have: Kerning tables that override the kerning information for a specific font. This is a great way to adjust kerning globally in say, a body copy sized font, rather than combing through each pair individually.

But I disagree about tracking being a quick fix. If you're kerning every letter pair in body copy, than chances are that the tracking choice is not appropriate for the final result you're looking for. Tracking should be set for an overall block or blocks of copy, depending on whatever type of letterspacing you're looking for, tight, normal, or open-spaced. After you've reviewed the overall type color and have decided that the tracking will work for the majority of your text, then you need to go in and adjust individual kern pairs accordingly. If you have just a little bit of text size copy, great, if not, well it's up to you as to how much time you'll want to spend kerning body copy. Which is why I wish InDesign had kern tables as a feature.

In general, also, the larger your point size, the tighter your tracking will be, even if you're going for an open look. It kind of works exponentially. 10 point type tracked at 0 will be quite a different visual feel than 18 point type tracked at 0. This is where your eyes come into play. The larger type will look visually more open than the smaller type.

In terms of optical kerning, this will also vary greatly in terms of your results depending on how well the font designer and the subsequent digitization of the font took character shoulders (the left and right edge of the character's bounding box) into account. I've seen this go all over the place, with some people being very careful about setting the character shoulders in the metric info for the font and others being really sloppy about it.

Another nicety that is often overlooked, that doesn't have to do with tracking and kerning is wordspacing. In general, I find that both Quark's and InDesign's default wordspacing are not necessarily appropriate, depending on the typeface and casing being used. You should get used to having several different values for wordspacing, depending on whether you're using a condensed font, a non-condensed font, or an extended font, upper and lowercase situations and all caps situations, etc. The wordspace needs to be appropriate to the font.

[mac.FINN]

And in the end ... nobody noticed or cared ;)

You either have an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or a lot of free time on your hands. I would love to hear the conversation between you and a customer explaining how spending 5 billable hours adjusting the space between each individual letter is money well spent.

School project...and one super anal retentive professor. Trust me, he noticed.

[MD]

Fair enough.

My quark instructor was like that, a tough grader, claimed he didn't give out an A in the last 6 years. Our final was to reproduce a brochure exactally as he had printed it out. With runarounds on all the pictures matching every line break turned out to be a giant pain in the ass. When you thought you were done you could show him and he would point out small kerning or tracking problems to you. When you go back and fix them it would re-flow the entire document and you were basically back to square 1. I needed a 93 to get an A for the semester ... I got a 91 ... :mad:

[Broacher]

>>Our final was to reproduce a brochure exactally as he had printed it out<<

If that were a real world assignment, you could have just headed to Kinko's.

What is it about these AR type instructor/sadists that you hear about? What possible justification would there be for an exercise like that other than to turn people away from the real creative potential of typography?

In my training (circa early 1980's), we had profs who insisted on using pasteup methods that hadn't even been used in industry (obsolete even back then--I'm not even talking about waxers-- they were verboten. We had to use two-coat rubber cement) --and marked with the same kind of angel-of-death strict scrutiny. Of course, nearly all those skills have gone to the great manual design skill landfill long ago. I can't believe how much time we put into that stuff! Honestly-- if these teachers put as much creativity into developing inspirational methodologies as they do in thinking up new ways to frustrate and basically waste people's time.... ugh!!

[MD]

In my training (circa early 1980's), we had profs who insisted on using pasteup methods that hadn't even been used in industry (obsolete even back then ...
Maybe using all the archaic methodology is like a rite of passage. It gives you a sense of how things were done in the past. Kinda like a "When I started in this business we didn't even have computers. A set of markers, pad of layout paper and my noodle is all we had back then ...." It kind of gives you a sense of history. But more than likely it's just a sign that the professor has spent too much time in academia - t's like a snapshot of how the industry was before they started teaching.

With a lot of the traditional drawing classes getting cut in favor of digital ones, The real question is how do we frustrate the next generation of designers? I suggest we give them a an old performa, and a copy of pagemaker. If they are lucky we can give them a copy of typetwister. Let them see how frustrating it is have to lock up your computer 10 times a day when you have tight deadlines.

What possible justification would there be for an exercise like that other than to turn people away from the real creative potential of typography?
That guy was notoriously tough - 1/2 the class was empty by the 3rd week.
Quiz - Every week - Every known keyboard shortcut.
In his defense he was a print department teacher, He made it clear on day 1 that this was not a design class, he was going to teach us Quark. By the end of the semester I had every keyboard shortcut memorized and a much deeper knowledge of the in and outs of Quark.

[urstwile]

Still sounds like a pointless exercise to me, at the least the part about matching his brochure exactly. I wonder if he was just worried that your typography would look better than his? :rolleyes:

Instead of having you mimic his linebreaks like monkeys, it might have been more instructive for him to explain to you why his typographic choices were chosen, etc. Great that you learned the shortcuts, but still, sounds like you were being taught how to use Quark more like a fancy word-processor with tracking and kerning than being taught the underlying principles behind his typographic choices.

[MD]

you were being taught how to use Quark more like a fancy word-processor with tracking and kerning than being taught the underlying principles behind his typographic choices.

It was a quark class in the printing department - not a design course. The exercise itself was a culmination of everything we had learned throughout the semester, not just a type flowing exercise.

BTW, Quark really is just a fancy word processor. :p

[urstwile]

:p Back.

Although I've seen it used that way by many. Sadly. My old-school background shudders at some of the stuff I see.

[Samakimoto Graphics]

I'll bet it made you appreciate the ease of things in the real world... I think that's why they make you do things that way.