How To Kern Professionally. (Not many know this!) 🤯

kerning is a huge part of type design and if you're a graphic designer or creative working with type then you should know how to properly space each character without proper kerning you wouldn't be able to read as well or as fast and things will get confusing i'm not talking specifically about tracking today which is the space between each letter form in a word or a sentence i'm talking about kerning which is the space between certain characters and letters between other certain characters and letters this video is brought to you by walling so here in adobe illustrator i've come out and put a couple of different fonts down i've got mine and another one which is quite similar which i like this is lockdown sans and i've made it intentionally so it is not turned correctly now the big thing that i see with a lot of designers is that they don't turn correctly when they send logos in so they just literally type something in and you find out from a designer like myself who works specifically in type design that it's not really well kerned and i'm going to show you today how you can find out whether something is properly kerned or not so step number one the rules of kerning it's very simple the idea is to have a nice even optical space between each letter form i've got the word placeholder here a few times you can see the differences here got one here that is kind of turned correctly just move that out just a tiny bit move that out just a tiny bit this one here is turned pretty well you can see the difference between this and the top one where each letter fits exactly where it should be now when we talk about the space in between each letter i'm talking about simply this this red is the space between the l and the a now obviously this is going to change because if i bring this space here into the a and c you can see it's it's slightly different it doesn't fit way in or even with the c and the h and the e and that's because of the shape of the letter forms you can see it fits between the h and the o pretty well there and if i bring it out over here it does not fit between these because it's just got different spacings the idea of keaney is to have an optical space which doesn't mean mathematical if i go into my app that creates fonts called glyphs i can show you here the spacing and kerning between the n and the o right now these don't have any kerning but they're spaced correctly so right now if i was to type in an n there's no weird spacing it looks like one clear block you can see all the way through it the same is for the o and that's because i've spaced these letters correctly to fit beside each other so i can go noo and this is a top common type practice doing this i'm making sure that one of these aren't like you know spaced weirdly in if i change the o it kind of looks a bit weird so what we're looking for is the space in between now that's the first lesson each space is like a jug so imagine this to be a joke where you fill it with water obviously it's going to fit everywhere around the jug so it's going to fit all around the letter form and up if we to do this for the h and the e so if i just go ahead and bring up my pen tool really quick give it the same border we can fit the same amount of water in here if that's a jug as we can fit in there it's just kind of backwards you can probably fit a bit more in there but this is the basics of kerning so what i'm looking for is an even spread of letter forms and it takes time and practice so in illustrator if i get a font that's like this the first thing i'm going to do is check the worst one so i want to make sure that the worst ones are fixed i'm going to press alt and just arrow space until i get somewhere where i think will work on the h and the o and the l and i'm looking at just two letter forms here and how they coincide now the obvious rule of thumb with h and o or anything that is rounded with a hard letter next to it so straighten around is that the rounded one has to be turned ever so slightly closer and that's just because of the way our brain works now whenever there's two characters with a straight and another straight such as the i and the n then we don't have to make this adjustment too much but we do know that the g here needs to be turned slightly closer in because it's rounded that's not mathematically correct but it is optically and this is how type works it's all about optical illusions so i'm going to go into here and i'm going to start making some other edits i'm going to bring the r in like so and it's just about trial and error we just bring them in bring them out bring them in and i'm someone who turns very close at first and then sort of spreads them out afterwards i'll zoom out to make sure that it looks okay i can see the l and the a turned way too close together so bring that out just one step and here we've got the properly curved masterpiece that is the placeholder text now let's change this to something like giga which could be a logo for someone else okay so here we've got one issue and i want you to pause the video to try and find the issue inside of giga one of the kerning issues are there if you haven't spotted it it is the g and the i so the g is way too far away from the eye so we're just going to hold alt and press the arrow key back over to itself and we're going to zoom in and zoom out making sure that it all looks aligned we're looking for even spacing something that helps me as well is by going to effect and putting a blur on top of it just ever so slightly or just squinting your eyes when you put a blur on top of it you can see if anything is weird or any more white space is there we use this a lot for guessing when doing typography and guessing is like another term for the way that the computer renders out type which i'll go into later now that we have that one that looks good let's do something like apple every logo type should be turned ever so slightly to be a bit tighter than it should be especially if it's a modern logo if it's something that's intentionally wide that is okay too so i'm just going through this and doing the arrow spacing to make sure it works all good see the e there is way too far out let's bring that back in a little bit boom if you're someone who wants to learn more about kerning and have fun whilst doing it there is a game for it called kern type or type.method.ac where you can literally turn it correctly and you can move things and try and find the exact kerning of what it should be you can only move a few letters let's see what i've got here i'm probably too far away no not too bad 80 remove these like so a shame i can't make it wider i've got 100 out of 100 that's not bad now this is a difficult one because i'm trying to keep the spacing in between the letters optically similar i'm not actually looking at the way the type looks right now 100 out of 100 just a bit there ollie let's bring this in 100 out of 100 again you can see here that every time that i'm doing this it's practicing my muscle memory in my brain to know when something is turned well and you might think this is boring but this is something that every designer needs to know it's a hack and kerning is basically this optical space that you see not the mathematical one the illusion that you see in between each letter now obviously you're a designer and that means you probably collaborate with clients unless you've got no clients at the moment but even then you need to organize your work and your output on social media and the best way of doing that is by using an app called walling walling is a visual workspace to collect ideas organize content and plan projects in collaborative walls as you can see the idea of walling is to basically have these blocks on a wall so it's all about visual ideas putting things down it's super easy but yet you can get so complex with this you can go further and further and really organize each project you can see on over here there's example ones here that you can use such as writing an article you can have images different parts in the board and you can even invite clients to check the work out and leave comments we've loaded templates to get you started from code snippets bookmarks a pitch deck and a creative brief which we've seen in a previous video it's super easy to get started and it's completely free so if this sounds like something that you're interested in to get your projects and ideas out there for your team or maybe just for you and your client then go ahead and click the link down below in the description thank you for watching this video today if you are new here please press that red subscribe button if you made it to the end comment carrots helps the algorithm and it also lets me know who watches to the end thanks for watching see you in the next video goodbye [Music]

Channel: Will Paterson

Views: 142,376

Rating: 4.9462748 out of 5

Keywords: design, vlog, graphic, art, photoshop, illustrator, adobe, Kerning, how to design, will paterson, will patterson design, patterson, graphic design, logo design, how to design a font, kerning, type design, typography

Id: DwzyRNcLkao

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021