Kerning vs. Tracking vs. Letter-Spacing
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When I interview junior designers at Cynda Media Lab, I ask how they pick a typeface for a headline and how they pick one for body copy. Most answer well on style, mood, and contrast. The void in almost every answer is the void itself: the white space between and around the letters.
What Kerning, Tracking, and Letter-Spacing Each Adjust
All three controls adjust the same material at three different scales. The material is white space, and kerning vs tracking is the scale distinction that matters most in practice.
Letter-spacing, tracking, and kerning describe three different scopes. Letter-spacing is the overall density of a word or block of text. Tracking is a uniform space adjustment applied across a run of characters. Kerning is an adjustment to the space between two specific characters, made to correct an optical gap.
Reach for kerning when one gap is wrong. Reach for tracking when every gap is wrong in the same direction.
| Scope | Applied to | Fixes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Letter-spacing | The whole setting | A word, a block, a page | Density and texture |
| Tracking | A run of characters | Everything you selected | Overall tightness |
| Kerning | One pair | Two adjacent characters | One optical gap |
The test is arithmetic. If tightening the headline by two units closes the gap between the A and the V, it takes two units from every pair that was already correct. You traded one visible error for nine small ones, which read as sloppiness.
Why Kerning Is a Pair Problem
Kerning corrects gaps that are optically uneven even when they are mathematically equal. Diagonals and rounds are the usual offenders. A capital A next to a capital V leans away on both sides and opens a hole. A lowercase r followed by a period leaves a gap wide enough to read as a word space.
How much kerning you do is a property of the typeface, not of your skill. Kerning pairs are stored inside the font file, either in a kern table or as GPOS feature data, according to the OpenType specification published by Microsoft. A working foundry ships pairs for every awkward combination it could anticipate. A free download often ships almost none.
The pairs nobody built are the ones you meet at headline size. A flaw invisible at 10 point scales with everything else, which is why a headline at 60 point needs hand kerning and the same typeface at 10 point almost never does.
Why Tracking Changes With Size
Tracking is a function of size. The space between letters does not scale the way the letters do.
- Headline sizes. Tighten. At headline scale the built-in spacing reads as loose and the words stop holding together.
- Body sizes. Leave it alone. Between roughly 6 and 14 point the defaults are correct, and touching them costs you legibility.
- Caption sizes. Open it up slightly. More space between letters raises the contrast between shapes, which is what a reader needs when the shapes are small.
- All caps and small caps. Open it up. Capitals were drawn to sit beside lowercase, not beside each other.
How to Pick a Typeface for Headlines and Body Copy
Judge a typeface by its white space, not only by its shapes, and judge it twice. Set the same sentence once at 10 point and once at 60 point, then look at the space between and around the letters and words rather than at the letterforms. A typeface can be convincing at one size and unusable at the other.
Each size fails in its own direction. Alex John Lucas proofs typefaces by printing large letters above paragraphs set between 9 and 12 point, where tight spacing shows up as dark patches and loose spacing as rivers. Peter Biľak of Typotheque puts the principle plainly. A type designer's job is to design text, not to draw individual characters, so calling a typeface good in text is a remark about its spacing.
Try This Today
Take a headline you have already set. Put the same words at 10 point directly underneath it. Hide everything but three letters at a time in the headline, adjust the middle gap until both spaces look equal, then move over one letter and repeat.
You will find the pair your tracking was hiding. The 10 point line will need nothing, which is the whole argument in one file.
Kerning is the least visible work in typography and the most decided. Every pair in every font is a judgment somebody made, or failed to make. The tool renders the letters. The gaps are still yours.
FAQ
Is kerning the same as tracking? No. Kerning adjusts the space between two specific characters. Tracking applies a uniform adjustment across every character in a selection. Kerning is a repair. Tracking is a setting.
Should I kern body text? Almost never. At text sizes the pairs built into the font are correct, and manual adjustment introduces inconsistency across a long document. Kern headlines, display type, and anything above roughly 24 point.
Why does my headline look badly spaced even after tracking it? Because tracking cannot fix an uneven pair. It moves every gap by the same amount, so the widest gap stays the widest. Find that pair and kern it.
C.J. Yeh is a founder and ECD at Cynda Media Lab and a co-founder of DSGN BY D. He is also a tenured professor and curriculum chair of Creative Technology and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Sources
OpenType specification, kern table, Microsoft, current edition. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/kern
Alex John Lucas, "The fundamentals of spacing a typeface," alexjohnlucas.com. https://alexjohnlucas.com/type/spacing-a-typeface
Peter Biľak, "Size-Specific Spacing of Fonts," Typotheque, 25 May 2021. https://www.typotheque.com/articles/size-specific-spacing-of-fonts