Kerning and the Mystical Concept of Flow

It’s been a few years now, but when I first took on a job at CustomInk.com as a Production Artist, I was affectionately refereed to as “the Kernal” due to my hyper critical attention to kerning pairs when proofing customer orders about to print. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that my perceptions of “wrong” weren’t based on any typographic rules (for example, the kerning of VA in Adobe’s Helvetica font is -80) but more a purely aesthetic reaction to the space between letters. In this awesome FontFeed video podcast you can listen to Font Bureau type designer Dyana Weissman explain the difference between kerning and spacing, why it should be done by hand, and generally geek out on the nuanced beauty of perfectly kerned type. For more from Ms. Weissman, check out her fascinating post on Font Bureau’s Type 101 blog titled Kerning, Flow & Music.