Brief 15 - Kerning

Now all of the characters have been input into Glyphs, the last thing to do is to get the kerning right. This is definitely going to be a long and tedious task, but it is necessary if I am wanting to type with it otherwise words will look disjointed.

When I input the characters, I did set the spacing on each side of every letter to 40. This is so that when it came to the kerning, I could see the spaces clearly and all the letters would be at an equal distance from one another.

I started with Sans Bold. I started by typing out words to see how the letters worked together.

The image above shows some of the clear problem areas. While the letters such as 'p' and 'i' work well, it is the letters like 'T' or 'y' which don't. This is due to the amount of white space in their letterform space.

This image shows the obvious issues with 'r' and 'v'. I was quite surprised with the bad kerning on the 'r' , but considering how far out the further point on the right is, it's understandable.

I also wrote a few words out in the slab serif versions as this is where the worst spacing would be due to the addition of the serif widths.

The issues are very clear here, especially with the 'Y' and 'V'. The 'T' doesn't look quite as bad as the sans versions due to the serifs, but it is still bad.

I also typed out in the rounded version, but found that it was identical to the sans.

To start the kerning, I found that the program does kerning partners, so I can kern every letter individually to every other letter. This is obviously good, but will be a very long winded process as there are 12 variations, and 124 characters for each.

However, through a bit of experimentation I found that I can copy and paste a full set of kerning from one variation to another. This will make it slightly easier as the Sans and Rounded versions are the same.

Kerning Letters

The list below shows how the kerning works, creating a list for every letter.

After a very long process of almost two days solid of just kerning these letters, I think I am finally at a stage where it is acceptable. While it probably isn't perfect, I think it looks pretty good and in typing out a lot of different words or character variations, I have covered quite a lot of bases.

It definitely gives me a sense of achievement to know that I am at this point where I am finishing with the last touches to a typeface, actually taking it through the process of being created and turned useable.