Graphic Designers Dazzle Clients with words like Whitespace and Kerning

In this golden age of the viewport, I am amazed at the lack of care given to typesetting. Yet most people that design and build for screens communicate a deep enthusiasm for the craft, name-dropping words such as whitespace and kerning. To be fair, some designers are stuck when faced with something like a bad letter pair. Maybe they can’t edit a font or don’t know how to code. I do fear though that such mishaps often just go unnoticed despite the professed expertise.

In my experience, laypeople know when typesetting isn’t right but they never think of it as something that can or should be fixed. They just suffer through it and call it good. Following are some easy fixes to these little annoyances.

Cramped Capital Strings

For body text and small titles, adding space to strings of capitals makes them more readable. I rarely see this done. And it’s a shame because that can really improve the reading experience when done right. Cap strings on their own are disruptive to the reading line. This is because they’re read more as individual letters than words. As we run across them, reading slows for each letter. Adding space makes them more readable. In the absence of smallcaps – or as an alternative – slightly reducing the size you set the capitals can make them more agreeable on the line.

Bad Letter Pairs

No font is perfect and most fonts have spacing issues. It really can’t be helped since there are literally thousands of possible letter pairs. Always look out for the un-kerned, they’re everywhere. The best place to adjust these are in the font, but if you can’t do that, you’ll have to fix them in production. Of course letter pairs across styles (italic/roman, i.e. two separate fonts) can’t be kerned so those too have to be adjusted in production. Look for collisions common with italics against roman closing punctuation.

But of course no one does this. Maybe for a static title here and there, but not much past that. These sorts of spacing issues are often just accepted. But if you can see them, why allow such obvious errors to remain?

For the top offenders, here is Simon Cozens’ top 50 most commonly left un-kerned glyph pairs (from a much larger list of ten-thousand across 514 fonts). An immensely useful list. Thanks Simon!

LT
LV
LY
TA
P,
Ta
VA
T.
AV
Yo
Ya
PA
YA
To
T,
P.
F,
AY
V.
Va
F.
AT
Te
Vo
LW
Y.
Ye
Y,
FA
V,
Ve
TÆ
Yu
WA
L”
T-
AW
Wa
Tœ
v.
y.
w.
W.
Tw
Tæ
VÆ
Wo
PÆ
r.
v,

Illegible Tiny Text

Super small text (<10px) needs added letter spacing throughout, especially when reversed light on dark. Slightly spaced text makes it appear larger and less cramped without noticeably changing its structure. Also legibility is made worse when small type is set light on dark because reversed type always appears more bold, and in this case more cramped.

Goudy’s famous euphemism “Anyone who would letterspace blackletter would steal sheep” is an oversimplification at best. Even blackletter needs letterspacing at tiny sizes. So, we should hope that even the great Goudy fancied sheep every once in a while. 🐑