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| The 2011 above is unkerned, the 2011 is kerned. |
Thursday, January 6, 2011
2011 is the start of something annoying.
Here is something you might not know about my job. I kern the year. 2011 unkerned above, 2011 kerned below. Kerning makes words more aesthetically pleasing by adjusting the spaces between the characters. 1 is a very bad number because it always has enough room to swing a cat, so 2011 looks all big and fat on the left, and all skinny and awkward on the right. Imagine 4 people of different sizes sitting on a bench and two of them are bumping elbows while two of them are unsociably alone. It's much nicer if everyone has the same amount of personal space. That's why I kern 2011. I will have to kern every year until 2020.
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I did not know this!
ReplyDeleteThough it took me a good look to see the difference between the kerned and unkerned, sadly...
Nice job, Jess! I agree; 2011 requires a bit of kerning to look good. There must be a slogan in that somewhere.
ReplyDeletei do like a well-kerned word - but i'm guessing you a) need a pro program to kern, and b) need to do it word by word - both of which rule out rookies. are these assumptions correct?
ReplyDeletea) yes, MS Word won't do it, b) yes, but you can create rules for pairs of letters in a document, which saves time.
ReplyDeleteIdeally fonts and programs should have carefully measured formulas so that kerning is at least OK without manually fiddling with it.