Good kerning is spacing between letter pairs that looks even, so the eye crosses a word without stopping. Bad kerning leaves a gap that splits the word, or squeezes two letters until they read as a third. Set "burn" too tight and it reads "bum." That's the whole difference, and it's visible to people who couldn't tell you what kerning is.
Good kerning vs. bad kerning at a glance
| Good kerning | Bad kerning | |
|---|---|---|
| What you see | An even texture with no light patches or dark clumps | A hole after the W in WATER, or "rn" fused into "m" |
| What the reader notices | Nothing. They read the word. | The spacing, before the word |
| Where it shows up | Nowhere in particular | Headlines, logos, all-caps lines, packaging, and small text where pairs merge |
| What causes it | A complete kerning table, checked at final size | A missing pair, a join between two weights, or type scaled far past what the font was tuned for |
| How it's fixed | It doesn't need fixing | Adjust the one pair, not the whole word |
What good kerning looks like
Good kerning matches the space people see, not the space a ruler measures. Every letter carries its own air, and the shapes decide how much.
Two straight stems, like the H and I in "HI," need the most space between them. A straight beside a round, like "HO," needs less. Two rounds, like "OO," need less again, because the curves fall away from each other before they meet. Diagonals and open shapes (A, V, W, T, L) bring the most empty space with them, and that's where the corrections pile up.
Squint at well-kerned text and it blurs into a line of even gray. That gray is the target. The mechanics behind it are covered in what kerning is.
The three kinds of bad kerning
Collisions. Two letters set too close read as one. "rn" becomes "m," so "modern" reads as "modem." "cl" becomes "d," so "clear" reads as "dear." Designers have a name for this: keming, which is "kerning" with its r and n merged. Collisions are the only kind that change what a word says, and they get worse as type gets smaller.
Overlaps. Letters with overhanging parts, like T, Y, V, and f, run into their neighbors when a pair is pushed too tight. The arm of a Y clips the letter after it. The hook of an f hits a closing quotation mark.
Gaps. Pairs like AV, WA, LT, and To leave holes when nobody adjusts them. An all-caps headline with a gap after the W reads as two words that lost their space. Gaps don't change the meaning. They make a layout look unfinished.
Good and bad kerning examples
The default WATER has a hole between the W and the A that's wider than the space between the T and the E. Kerned, the A tucks under the W's right arm and the word holds together. Same font, same size, same tracking. One pair moved.
Collisions show best at small sizes. Set "burn" tight enough and the eye reads "bum" before the brain catches up. Open the r and n by a fraction and the word comes back.
A headline that puts a bold word beside a light one breaks metric kerning at the join. The font has a pair for a bold A next to a bold V. It has nothing for a bold A next to a light V, so the software falls back to default spacing. Optical kerning spaces that join by shape and closes the gap.
Worked example: Kerning a headline pair by pair
Take "TRAVEL TODAY" in a geometric sans, set in capitals at the size it'll run.
- Turn on metric kerning, set tracking to zero, and view the line at its real size.
- Start with the loudest gap. In TRAVEL it's AV, two diagonals leaning apart. Tighten until the triangle of space between them looks like the space between E and L.
- Fix RA next. The R's leg and the A's diagonal leave a wedge at the baseline. It needs less than AV.
- Move to TO. The T's bar overhangs, so the O can slide under it. Stop before the curve touches the bar.
- Fix AY the same way as AV. The Y's arms open up over the A.
- Leave EL and OD alone. Straight-and-round pairs are the font's job, and a decent table already handles them.
- Check the word space. Tightening the letters makes the gap between TRAVEL and TODAY look bigger, so pull it in if the words drift apart.
- Squint, then flip the line upside down. Any pair that still jumps out gets one more pass.
In Adobe apps, kerning values are measured in thousandths of an em, so a value scales with the type. A fix made at one size holds when the line is resized.
Where people disagree about kerning
Tight vs. too tight. Digital tools made kerning easy, and a lot of display type has since been set so tight the letters nearly touch. Some type practitioners argue overkerning now causes more problems than too little kerning. The test isn't how close the letters are. It's whether the spaces look equal. A tight headline with even spaces is well kerned. A tight headline where AV nearly kisses and EL sits loose is badly kerned, however current it looks.
Metric vs. optical. Purists trust the type designer's built-in pairs. Optical kerning ignores those pairs and spaces by shape. Each side is right in its own case. Metric wins on a single weight of a well-made typeface, because someone tuned those pairs by hand. Optical wins at a join between weights, sizes, or typefaces, and in a font with thin kerning data.
Whether to touch it at all. One camp says every headline needs a manual pass. The other says a good font arrives kerned, so change only what's visibly wrong. For body text the second camp wins outright. For a logotype, nothing ships without the manual pass.
Why bad kerning happens
The pair isn't in the font. Free fonts, older fonts, and some display fonts ship with thin kerning tables. If the pair isn't there, the software has nothing to apply.
The type is far bigger than the font was tuned for. A pair that reads fine at 12 points has a visible hole at 120.
Two weights, sizes, or typefaces meet in one line. The font has no data for the join.
It's set in capitals. Uppercase is where the diagonals and crossbars live, so an all-caps headline has more problem pairs per word than the same line in sentence case.
The letters connect. Script fonts are built to join, so a pair too loose breaks the stroke and a pair too tight doubles it.
Tracking was used to fix one pair. Tightening a whole word to close one gap creates new collisions elsewhere. Kerning vs. letter spacing covers when to reach for which.
The pairs to check first
| Pair | What goes wrong | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| AV, VA, WA, AW, AY | Opposing diagonals leave a triangle of space | Tighten until it matches the rest of the word |
| To, Ta, Ty, Tr, Yo | The bar or arms leave empty space above the lowercase letter | Tuck the letter under, short of touching |
| LT, LY, LV | The L's foot leaves a gap before the next letter | Tighten |
| rn, cl, vv | Read as m, d, and w at small sizes | Loosen |
| f before a quotation mark or bracket | The f's hook hits the punctuation | Loosen, or use the font's alternate f if it has one |
| L" or T" | The quotation mark floats away or crowds the letter | Adjust the pair by eye |
| 11 in running text, as in "2011" | The narrow numeral sits loose beside its neighbors | Kern the pair by hand. In tables, use tabular figures so columns align instead. |
How to fix kerning in your tool
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign expose kerning in their character panels, with a choice between metric and optical kerning and manual adjustment for individual pairs. Place the cursor between the two letters and change the value. The guides for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign cover each panel.
Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has a kerning setting in its advanced font options. Kerning in Microsoft Word walks through it.
Google Slides, Docs, and Sheets. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides expose none, so the workaround there is to adjust letter spacing or nudge individual characters. Kerning in Google Slides sets out the method.
Canva. Check kerning in Canva for its spacing controls.
Figma. Figma applies the font's built-in kerning by default and exposes letter spacing for manual adjustment.
Websites. The CSS property font-kerning decides whether the browser applies the font's built-in pairs: normal applies them, none turns them off, and auto leaves the choice to the browser. letter-spacing applies one value to every character, so it can't fix a single pair. For a logotype on a web page, use an SVG so the spacing can't shift.
How to check your own kerning
None of these need a trained eye.
- Flip it. Turn the text upside down or mirror it. You stop reading the word and start seeing shapes, and uneven gaps jump out.
- Squint. Blur your eyes until the letters become a texture. Dark clumps are pairs set too tight. Light patches are pairs set too loose.
- Cover it. Hide everything except three letters. The middle one should sit centered between its neighbors. Slide along the word one letter at a time.
- Set it at size. Preview or print at final dimensions. A pair that's fine at 24 points is a different pair at 240.
- Check the joins. Anywhere two weights, sizes, or typefaces meet in a line, check that pair by hand.
Before handover, run one last pass on the exported file, not the design file.
Troubleshooting kerning problems
The kerning changed after export. The font was substituted. Someone opened the file without the font installed, or a PDF went out without the font embedded, and a different font with different pairs took its place. Embed fonts on export, or convert final display text to outlines and keep an editable copy.
It looked fine on screen and wrong on the poster. It was only checked at screen size. Print a section at 100 percent and look again.
Fixing one gap made two more. Tracking did the fixing. Reset tracking to zero and kern the single pair.
The live headline looks looser than the design file. Check that font-kerning isn't set to none, and that the site loads the same font file the designer used.
The template was right and the variants aren't. Manual kerning belongs to the letters it was set between. Change the copy and those values don't follow the new words, so the new pairs fall back to the font's defaults. Every new line of copy needs its own check.
When kerning matters and when it doesn't
It matters anywhere type is large or set once and seen many times: logos, headlines, all-caps lines, packaging, signage, and ad headlines. It also matters in small text, where collisions change words.
It doesn't matter in body text set in a well-made font at reading size. Leave that to metric kerning and spend the time elsewhere. Monospaced fonts don't take kerning at all, since every character occupies the same width by design. Our monospaced font examples show what that looks like.
Where bad kerning gets through
Bad kerning ships because nobody was looking at the moment it multiplied. A headline gets approved at 24 points on a laptop. Then it becomes a billboard, a social crop, and forty ad variants, and the AV gap nobody saw at 24 points is the first thing anyone sees at 240. The hand-kerned pairs from the original line don't follow new copy into the variants, so each one is a fresh set of defaults.
The fix is a step, not a sharper eye. Superside's published process runs "brand and spec QA checks before a human reviews", and spacing is the kind of detail that step catches: one check, at final size, at the point where an asset is about to multiply. Quality control for AI-generated creative covers how the same review works when the volume comes from generation.
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Related reading
- What is Kerning? (Uses and Roles in Typography) — Ever wondered why some text just 'feels right'?
- Kerning vs Letter Spacing: Understanding the Nuances of Typography — Dive into the world of typography with our comprehensive guide on kerning vs letter spacing.
- Kerning vs Leading vs Tracking: A Comprehensive Guide to Typography