How much do you know about letterspacing?

​Learn how to improve beauty & readability at the same time 
 
We read so much that it’s scary. You’re reading this sentence. How much else have you read today? How much more will you read? 
 
It can be tiring. Specifically, it can be more fatiguing than it needs to be. It can also be a heck of a lot uglier than it needs to be.
 
We’re talking about letterspacing. 
 
Here’s a great quote: “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.” 
 
It bears repeating. “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.”
 
Chew on that one for a second. We’ll circle back to it shortly. 
 
Pick a font, any font? 
 
Let’s start with some real basics here. Serif vs. sans-serif fonts. The serif, as you know, is that little flourish on the end of a stroke, like the little fingers that hang down from the top ends of a letter “T.” Tradition says that serif fonts are the best choice for body copy; the serifs themselves help to set the baseline and subtly align the text, helping the reader along. 
 
“Helping the reader along.” Another good quote. 
 
Sans-serif fonts, on the other hand, are traditionally employed for headlines, for bold applications. The all-time iconic sans-serif font is Helvetica. It’s ubiquitous to the point that it gets bashed and abused, but it’s iconic for a reason. Its elegance lies in its understated beauty. 
 
So. Serif for body copy. Sans-serif for headlines. Simple as that, right? 
 
Of course not. You know that here at Copel Communications, we’re avid fans of justified rule-breaking. There are times when you want to play against expectations, when you want to surprise your audience. Swapping out a serif font for a san-serif one, or vice versa, is the simplest example there is. 
 
Which gets us back to letterspacing. 
 
What’s missing from fonts
 
Back in the day, each letter in the font had its own letterspacing built in. We’re not talking TrueType or OpenType. We’re talking metal. The word “font” shares the same root, in French, as “foundry,” which is where metal was melted down to cast actual fonts. (We know more about this than most people. Be sure to check out our killer blog, “We Bought Fonts at a Foundry.”) So each letter would have a certain amount of metal around it, to “automatically” provide the proper spacing vis-a-vis the ones beside it. 
 
Overall it worked well. But not perfectly. Look at any old book that was printed via letterpress. (If you’re not sure, simply feel the pages. The hard type makes a physical impression in the paper, in contrast to lithography, wherein the printing plates are smooth.) Now, look closely at the type itself. 
 
It will look, well, old. Something about it will appear amiss. 
 
And it’s the flawed letterspacing. The carved-in-metal dictates of the individual letters can’t possibly anticipate, let alone compensate for, the juxtaposition of letter pairs that require special spacing. We’re talking “V-A”, for example. The word “AVAIL,” in caps like that, generally looks horrible when it’s set in metal type. There’s all that dead space in the diagonal channels between the “V” and its pair of flanking “A’s.” It hurts your eyes, and your brain, to read it. 
 
Of course, we’re not setting type like that anymore. It’s all done via computer. And modern computer fonts do have algorithms baked into them to compensate for these special situations. Overall, they work quite well. They can scoot a “V” closer to an “A” without any need for, oh, shaving down a piece of metal!
 
But computers and algorithms can only do so much. The rest is up to you. 
 
Get kerning
 
That quote we’d cited above—“The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves”—is from a great art teacher we’d had back in junior high school. Some wisdom just sticks. 
 
He was absolutely right. It’s not just “V-A.” It’s all the letters. A good font is an incredible creation: the way it appears aligned and uniform, when it’s actually an orchestration of careful cheats and eye-trickers, from the capital “O” that may descend beyond the baseline to the “fi” ligature which elides what would’ve been a distracting double-dollop between the serif on the “f” and the dot atop the “i.” 
 
The thing is, the beauty is in there. It’s up to you to liberate it, not constrain it, not shackle it. 
 
Our junior high teacher’s quote is as close as we can get to a “rule” here. This is art, not science. You need to play, to look at it, to experiment. Save your different versions and compare them. Sometimes you’ll want to break the rules: You’ll want to crash those letters together. Or you’ll want to stretch them out, airily, in order to underscore the message. Ditto for leading (pronounced “ledding”): the vertical spacing between individual lines. Use our art teacher’s guidance. Or creatively avoid it. 
 
Here’s the irony in all this. Done right, the best possible creation is practically invisible to the audience. It just... reads. It looks beautiful. It transmits its message. 
 
And that’s what type is supposed to do. 
 
Having trouble with that creative challenge? Contact us. We help clients of all stripes with these kinds of issues, and more, every day.  

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