Serif vs. Sans-Serif FontsThis is simple concept to understand. A "serif" is a little squiggly item at the end of the letter. The serif creates a more natural flowing look to the text that makes it easier to read. The graphic at right shows the difference between the two. The word "sans" in "Sans Serif" means "without" in French, therefore, this type does not include the squiggly items on the text. |
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Kerning of TextKerning is a very important topic that not too many people know about. In certain letter pairs, there is an unnatural excess space as a result of the shapes of the letters. A classic examples is between the the capital letters "A" and "V." In the graphic at right, compare the space between "A" and "V" to the space amongst the other letters in this word. Notice that the space is not the same...there is more space between "A" and "V" than between the other adjacent letter pairs in this word. Now look at the next example showing the same word after the first two letters have been kerned. Nice the difference? Now there is roughly the same space between all the letter pairs. Kerning is something that not too many non-designers know about. When you are aware of this issue and you see blatant kerning issues in text it can make you cringe. |
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Another Kerning Example
Look the word "Institution" below. To the untrained eye this might look fine. If you examine this word closely enough you should notice that all is not well. If it isn't that obvious, quickly glance over the blank white space between each pair of letters to get a feel of the average amount of white space between all letter pairs. On second glance it's fairly clear that there is more white space occurring between the first and last three letters. What to do about it is a highly subjective decision. You could either tighten-up these letter pairs at the beginning and end of this word, or you could increase the white space between the middle letter pairs. In this case I have decided to tighten-up the first and last letter pairs. If you look at the second part of the graphic I have highlighted in blue areas in the word that I think there is too much white space occurring.
There are two ways to adjust kerning in a page layout application like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw...both of these have kerning adjustment settings so you can manually adjusting the spacing between each (or all) letter pairs, or you can use the Create Outlines command, which turns the fonts into graphics where you can manually adjust each letter on its on. The bad part of using this later method is that the word ceases to be editable text. This is however my favorite way to kern text.
Looking at the 3rd example, you can see that I have tightened-up the text. To me it looks much better. Being that this is so subjective, you might have made other choices for how to increase or decrease the kerning pairs between the letter pairs. Nevertheless, I think that the word looks significantly better than its original state.
