Kerning can be a tricky part of dealing with typography. Recently a fellow designer shared a method she uses and I thought it was really clever. Trying to deal with kerning can sometimes be a bit frustrating but this little tip can take some of that frustration away.

Flip the text 180 degrees. Yes, that’s it!

Here let me show you exactly what I mean. First we’ll take a set of words that has a couple of common letter pairs that need kerning corrected on them.

If you are used to dealing with kerning the corrections will jump out and smack you right in the face. If you aren’t used to seeing these types of issues, I have highlighted the areas that need to be corrected.

Now that we have determined the problem areas we will attempt to correct them. This is where the flipping comes in. You can try to do the corrections the normal way but flipping the text makes it much easier.

Now you can make the corrections and it is easier for you to look at the letters as objects you are trying to space correctly rather than a word you want to read. Here are my results, right before I flipped the text back to right side up.

Now you flip the text and Ta Da! The kerning is much better and the text looks cleaner. It really is that simple!!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Tips & Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.