Thursday 7 October 2010

Type - Kerning and Readability


Definition: Kerning is the adjustment of space between paris of letters to make then more visually appealing. It is normally applied to individual letter pairs in headlines or other large type.

Also known as: Letter spacing, character spacing.

Examples: The default spacing between some characters leaves gaps that can be adjusted by kerning the two letters to achieve a more visually balanced appearance. Decreasing space is negative kerning. Some commonly kerned pairs include Wa, To, and Ya. Sometimes kerning involves increasing the space between characters or positive kerning to keep them from running together, such as the I's in Godzilla.

Kerning - if you add more space between letters it slows the reading pace down and vice versa.



HELLO MY NAME IS ELLIS

H E L L O M Y N A M E I S E L L I S


It is key within writing novels etc.


Using arial I have increased the kerning to make my name more visually appealing.





Arial is a very popular font because it is at the beginning of the alphabet.

If you change the kerning you should always increase the spacing between the letters not decrease.


Using a bold font can make the font look like the words are SHOUTING!
Using a light font can make the font look like the words are WHISPERING...
CAPS LOCK CAN MAKE THE FONT LOOK ANGRY!!!
lower case can make it look scared or quiet


The first thing you look at on a page may not be the first thing that you read. For example there may be a big red for sale advert which will attract your eyes first, however bold font on an article can distract and make you read the writing first.

For this exercise the aim was to make you read the bottom of the page to the top reading 1,2,3,4. I have done this by using position, size, weight and upper/lower case.






For this exercise I only used one tool to help draw your eyes to a certain place at a certain time - SIZE.





Hopefully your eyes should read from 1-4 in sequence.


Next I looked at how you can make your eyes read from 1-4 when the number four is the biggest font.





Flipping the number four over makes it harder to read. Your eyes automatically scan to the number one at the top of the page and then leave the bottom word till the end to decipher.

Placing things in different positions helps to move your eyes in different ways. Knowing how this is done helps you to communicate with your audience better.



When writing a sentence or a heading on multiple lines, the line split should reflect the break in speech, for example.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt

If your break the line up as below it doesn't read right...

Better to remain silent and be
thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt

Breaking up the lines like so helps the sentence flow more smoothly...

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak and remove all doubt

The line break imitates a comma.

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