If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last 20 years, it’s that any graphic designer worth their salt has to have a bit of an obsessive personality. I know I’m a bit obsessive. And I also know a fair few graphic designers who are, ahem, ‘familiar with that trait’…
I admit to having quite a few obsessions. Photography. The Beatles. Notebooks. 80s music. Black fibre tip pens. Typography. Liverpool FC. The Guardian’s Saturday Sports section. I also admit to having a mild case of OCD…
But typography. That’s the big one. Typography. Ever since I was about 12 years old and my Uncle gave me a ‘lettering book’… I spent hours on end tracing the letters from the book. Gill Sans. Helvetica. Times. Garamond. Goudy. But I could never get the words looking right or reading correctly. It used to bug me. I then went off to polytechnic to study Graphic Design. And I use the word ‘study’ very lightly. Believe me. But I did learn a few things about typography…
I discovered the joys of leading, kerning, justification, x height, cap height, picas, points, baselines. How to use a typescale to measure type. But it was always kerning that interested me the most. That you could make a word read correctly just by altering the space between the letters! Wow. The space needed between an ‘m’ and an ‘n’ is different to that between a ‘d’ and an ‘s’. Finding that if you used an ‘f’ and ‘I’ together, a ligature is sometimes required (that’s another blog subject altogether).
Kerning has to be spot on.
Whenever I see a word, a sign, a logotype, a heading in a newspaper… The first thing I look at is the kerning. Is the spacing correct? It’s wrong far too often. I have a collection of photo’s of bad kerning. I’m not going to reveal them here ‘cos I may get myself into trouble. But you’d be surprised at some of the high profile national and international brands that have bad kerning. I’ve seen some bad examples locally too.
You kind of expect it when a logotype or a heading or a word has been typeset by someone who’s not a designer. Without formal design training or some decent mentoring from an experienced designer how can you be expected to learn about kerning? So all you non-designers who are guilty of kerning crimes, you are just about forgiven. Just…
But if you’re a trained designer, or if you call yourself a designer, or if you earn a living as a designer, you really have a duty to your client to get the kerning right. You can’t get away with just typing a word into your computer, choosing a font and ‘that’s it, finished’. There’s far more to it than that. There’s a skill and set of rules you need to apply. And you need a trained eye. But I don’t need to go into that here. Cos if you’re not a designer you’ll be bored within seconds. Believe me. All I can say is it involves a lot of squinting, tipping your head sideways from left to right, right to left, several times. A sheet of tracing paper. And a window.
But if you’re a designer you already know all of that. Right?
As I said at the start of this rant, if you don’t take care of your kerning then your work needs burning. I mean it…
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