Banish kerning calamities and learn to love leading with our expert tips and tricks for perfect typography.
In this article, we're going to reveal some typography tips and tricks that you can use to boost your design skills and impress friends and colleagues. But before you even begin getting into the intricacies of setting type in the likes of InDesign, it's important to know the basics.
If you need a refresher on type terms then check out our article What is typography? Learn the basic rules and terms of type! For this article, though, the most important thing you need to know is the difference between kerning and tracking. Kerning is the spacing between specific pairs of letters, whereas tracking works across a range of characters or even paragraphs or whole documents.
Kerning is a fine art – and one you can quickly get good at using both InDesign's tools and some tricks in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. In InDesign or Illustrator, you can adjust kerning by selecting the Type tool and clicking on the gap between two characters, before holding down Alt/Opt and using the left and right arrows to adjust the space between them. By default the increment applied with each press of the arrow is 20 thousandths of an em, but you can adjust this preference for tighter control.
Once you've got the hang of that, read on to discover how you can take your typography skills to the next level...
