Kerning is the adjustment of space between two individual characters in a line of text. It's the smallest decision in typography and one of the most visible when it goes wrong.
Most of it now happens automatically. Fonts carry their own kerning tables and design software applies them before anyone opens a type panel. So the question is no longer how to kern by hand. It's where the automatic pass breaks, and who is checking.
What is Kerning?
Kerning is the space between two specific characters, adjusted so the pair reads evenly. It is not leading, the vertical space between lines, and it is not tracking, which changes spacing uniformly across a run of characters. Kerning is always about a pair.
Some pairs need it more than others. "AV" is the standard example: the two diagonals lean away from each other and leave a gap wider than the spaces around it, even though the metrics say otherwise. "To" and "Wa" behave the same way. They are correctly spaced by measurement and wrongly spaced by eye, and the eye decides.
The History of Kerning
In metal typesetting, kerning was physical. Type was cast on rectangular bodies, and tucking one letter closer to another meant filing the metal away so part of the letterform overhung its body. Digital type moved that work into the font file, and typefaces now ship with kerning pairs built in. The craft moved upstream into type design. What is left for everyone else is knowing when the built-in answer is wrong.
Why is Kerning Important in Typography?
Kerning decides whether text is comfortable to read and whether it looks considered. Set a pair too loose and a word splits into pieces. Set it too tight and letters merge into each other: "rn" starts to read as "m", "cl" as "d", and the reader stops on a word that should have cost nothing.
At larger sizes the effect stops being subtle. Headlines, packaging, and logotypes are read as shapes before they are read as words, so an uneven pair reads as sloppiness rather than as a choice. Bad kerning is one of the few typographic errors that people who know nothing about typography still notice. Our guide to good kerning vs bad kerning works through what that looks like.
How Does Kerning Work?
Even spacing is a matter of perception, not measurement. The area between every pair in a word should look equal, which means the measurements are not.
Design software offers two routes. Metric kerning uses the pairs the type designer built into the font, the right default for a well-made typeface. Optical kerning ignores those tables and spaces characters by their shapes, which helps when a font has thin kerning data or when you mix typefaces, sizes, or weights in one line. Neither is right in every case. A well-kerned serif at body size needs no attention. A display face at 200 points always does.
Kerning vs Leading vs Tracking
All three describe space. Only one describes a pair.
- Kerning is the space between two specific characters.
- Leading is the vertical space between lines of text.
- Tracking is letter spacing applied evenly across a word, a line, or a whole block.
Tracking is the blunt instrument, kerning the precise one. If a whole heading feels cramped, that's tracking. If one gap in it looks wrong, that's kerning. Our comparison of kerning, leading, and tracking covers how the three interact.
Kerning vs Letter Spacing
Letter spacing changes the space after every character by the same amount. Kerning changes the space between one pair. The distinction matters most in code, where CSS letter-spacing applies a uniform value while font-kerning controls whether the browser uses the font's built-in pairs at all. Letter spacing suits a line of capitals or a small label. Kerning fixes the one gap letter spacing cannot reach. See kerning vs letter spacing for how the two behave together.
Kerning Use in Design Software
Every tool below exposes kerning differently, and several don't expose it at all.
Full control. 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. Guides for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign cover the specifics.
Motion and video. After Effects and Premiere Pro handle kerning through their character panels, using the same metric and optical logic.
Interface and product design. Figma applies the font's built-in kerning by default and exposes letter spacing for manual adjustment. That covers most screen work.
Canva. Canva provides a simple slider for adjusting letter spacing, including kerning.
Document and presentation tools. Microsoft Word has a kerning setting in its advanced font options. Excel has no native kerning control. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides expose none either, so the workaround there is to adjust letter spacing or nudge individual characters. Our guide to kerning in Google Slides sets out that method, and kerning in Microsoft Word covers the Word setting.
How is Kerning Applied in Different Typefaces?
Serif typefaces need finer adjustment, because serifs create small horizontal shelves that change how close two letters can sit before they read as joined. Script typefaces are the hard case: letters are designed to connect, so a pair slightly too loose breaks the join and a pair slightly too tight overlaps the stroke. Monospaced typefaces are the exception. Every character occupies the same width by design, so kerning them defeats the point of using one.
How Does Kerning Differ in Various Languages?
Latin conventions don't transfer. Cyrillic has its own problem pairs, and its capitals behave differently from their Latin lookalikes. Arabic connects letters contextually and stacks diacritical marks above and below the baseline, so spacing has to account for vertical collisions as well as horizontal ones. This is what goes wrong in localization: a layout kerned in English and then translated is not a kerned layout in the new script.
How Does Kerning Impact Logo Design?
Logotypes are the highest-stakes kerning there is. A logo is set once, reproduced everywhere, and read at sizes from a favicon to a building. Slightly loose reads as amateur. Slightly tight turns a word into a shape people misread. It's also where automatic kerning helps least, because logotypes are customized and letters redrawn, so the font's built-in pairs no longer describe what is on the artboard.
The Future of Kerning in Typography
Generative tools are where kerning breaks now. They produce letterforms that look like type without being type: no kerning table, no pairs, nothing in the file that knows what the spacing was meant to be. Real typefaces have never been better spaced, and that's what makes the failure easy to ship. When the default is good enough, people stop looking. Looking is the only thing that catches a capital beside a quotation mark, a numeral against a bracket, or a logotype set in a face whose kerning tables were never finished.
Superside's published position on AI is that no GenAI reaches a final deliverable without human review and your sign-off. Spacing is exactly what that rule is for. One bad pair in one headline is trivial. The same pair carried through a template into every size, locale, and format of a campaign is a brand problem, and it lands everywhere before anyone notices. Software sets the spacing. A person decides whether it looks right, once, at the point where the work multiplies.
Conclusion
For most text the font and the software get kerning right. The work left is knowing where they won't: display sizes, logotypes, mixed typefaces, connected scripts, non-Latin text, and anything generated rather than set. Those are the places that need a second look, and the second look is human.
Related reading
- Good Kerning vs. Bad Kerning: Mastering the Art of Typography — Uncover the power of kerning in typography.
- 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