Friday Fillip: Kern Me, Baby

Which is not the same thing as “beer me”—it’s too early on a Friday for any of that, though both have to do, perhaps, with a kind of adjustment.

I’m a typophile—which is very like being a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, as the Bard once put it, because nothing could be triflingly smaller than a single letterform or, indeed, the space between letters; and as for “unconsidered,” the job of type is to appear and yet to disappear at the same time so that the message comes through as clearly and as beautifully as possible. So what of kerning? What is a “kern” when it’s at home, anyway? From French carne ‘projecting angle, nib of a quill pen’, in turn from Latin cardinem hinge, a kern was originally the bit of a letter that hung out past the body, as the curl of the letter “f” might, for instance. To “kern” became to adjust the distance between letters so as to make the spaces more visually pleasing despite, as it were, the peculiarities of each letter such as the overhanging bits or a letter’s fatness or thinness.

Back in the typewriter days, this sort of precision wasn’t possible for the average person, because typefaces were used that accorded each letter the same amount of space on the page—”monospaced” fonts. And even now on the web, it’s something of a struggle to manage letter spacing. But kerning is something you can nevertheless come to appreciate even though you might not be able to use it in your everyday writing: look at signs, logos, book type with an eye to judging how well the printer has ordered his minions. Does this letter need to be tucked under the “kern” of that one? Shouldn’t the plump “o” be nestled closer to its neighbour than the skinny “i”?

To help you with this form of verbal microscopy, I offer you this kerning game. You adjust the spacing of the internal letters until they’re right—as you see it. Then you let the website show you how the experts would space it. And before you know it you’ll be on the slippery slope to typophilia, which, though it’s not in the DSM IV (or V), can lead to slow computers, as they struggle to mount thousands of typefaces…