The
Ker K ern ni n ng g G
a
m
e
My first attempt wasn’t horrible. It was a short word with two letters that I had to adjust so I couldn’t really mess it up.
I have had some experience with kerning in a journalism class I took last semester where the professor briefly taught us the fundamentals of typography. Thus I have some knowledge on which letters should be kerned closer together than the default setting.
However, that doesn’t mean that I am any expert at kerning. My first couple of tries were not horrible, but also had room for improvement. Partly I was learning how the designers of the game thought as well as just getting practice at eyeballing distances between letters.
This attempt I nailed. I definitely do better with upright, straightforward letters with minimal doodads on them. Once italics or swashes got involved I would get a little tripped up and have trouble with the kerning.
Another thing that seemed to give me a little issue, was how spaced out the letters were initially. If I had complete control, I would compress the entire word a good amount instead of spacing out the middle letters between the first and last letter. The default spacing just seemed so wide to me that it was hard to visualize equal spaces between the letters. However, I suppose the extreme space can be beneficial, especially if the text is on a screen because it makes it more readable.
At this point I’m beginning to get a lot more consistent with my kerning. I’ve had good practice and enough examples so I can start to see the bigger picture. A lot of the skill is “tucking in” letters that have negative space from arms, legs that or crossbars. For example T and o can be kerned closer together because the crossbar of the T can overhang the o.
This example gave me a run for my money. I spent a lot of time figuring out how close to fit the italicized letters and their swashes. But my focus and continual tweaking payed off because I surprisingly managed to earn a 100.
This example was also very diabolical. By this point in the game I had become used to a lot of spaces between the letters and then suddenly this large word had none. Especially the g and a combinations were hard because the ear of the g kept colliding with the terminal of the a and made me angry. It was especially frustrating because I would shift the first a to the right by two nudges and suddenly have the nudge every single letter after it.
This one almost tripped me up, but I quickly realized that the trick was to place the o significantly under the T. After that all the other letters fell into place.
This was an interesting example because while I was doing it I could not decide where to put the y for the life of me. It went back and forth a million times. I think it is because the angle of the arm of the y and leg of the x is not the same so they didn’t seem to fit as nicely as I would like them to. Also I noticed that on my first attempt Xylo was extremely spread out and phone was very condensed for some reason. But I fixed that.
Overall, I thought this game was pretty fun! I’m progressively becoming more and more of a typography nerd the longer the semester progresses. The concept of this game is also extremely applicable in class and design in general. Not only is kerning important for the aesthetic qualities of a document, but it can also be critical for clarity. If letters have too high of a kerning between them, the words can run together into one long string of letters and make it hard to read. It’s somewhat likely I’ll play the game again, but that also depends on if the words change. If they do I’d love to practice again and try kerning new words and fonts, however, if the words do not change and I end up with the same ten words, I probably won’t play again. I don’t want to just end up memorizing how to kern Toronto twenty times. Either way, I enjoyed this exercise and I can tell I became significantly better at kerning by the end of the ten examples.
Bad Kerning