If you’ve ever looked at a piece of text and felt like something was slightly off — a word that looked a little awkward, two letters that seemed too close together or weirdly far apart — there’s a good chance kerning was the culprit. Kerning is one of those typography concepts that operates below most people’s conscious awareness, but which trained designers notice immediately.
Understanding kerning won’t just improve your technical knowledge — it’ll change how you see text, and it’ll make your designs noticeably more polished.
Kerning is the adjustment of space between individual pairs of letters to create visually consistent spacing. The key word is “individual” — kerning is about specific letter pairs, not about the spacing of text as a whole.
Here’s why this matters: different letter shapes create different amounts of perceived space between them, even when the mathematical distance between them is identical. The combination of “AV” for example, creates a visual gap between the letters because of the diagonal strokes on both characters — they angle away from each other, creating a perceived hole in the middle. Without kerning adjustment, “AV” looks looser than “HH” even if the numeric spacing is the same.
These three terms all relate to spacing in typography, and they’re frequently confused:
Adjusting space between specific pairs of letters. It’s about fixing individual problem combinations — the space between “T” and “o”, between “W” and “A”, between “f” and “i” — to make them look visually even.
Adjusting the overall spacing between all letters in a word, sentence, or paragraph uniformly. Where kerning is surgical, tracking is wholesale. Increasing tracking makes text feel more airy and refined (common in luxury branding). Decreasing tracking makes text feel denser and more intense.
The vertical space between lines of text (pronounced “ledding” — it comes from the lead strips that typesetters used to put between lines of type). More leading makes text feel open and readable; less leading makes it feel compact and intense.
Professional typefaces — including all the fonts in Burntilldead Studio’s catalog — include built-in kerning pairs. These are specific instructions built into the font file that tell design software how to adjust the space between particular letter combinations.
A well-kerned professional font might include hundreds or even thousands of kerning pairs — covering not just the obvious problem combinations but subtler ones across uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and punctuation in multiple combinations.
This is one of the clearest markers of font quality. Poorly made free fonts often have minimal or no kerning pairs built in, which is why they can look slightly off even when everything else about them seems fine. When you invest in a professional font, you’re partly paying for the hours of kerning work that went into making the spacing feel natural.
Even with well-kerned fonts, there are situations where manual kerning adjustment is needed:
In most professional design software, manual kerning is done by placing your text cursor between two letters and using keyboard shortcuts to adjust the space:
Here’s a technique professional typographers use to check kerning: turn your text upside down (or look at it in a mirror). When you remove the ability to read the words, you see the spacing between letters purely as visual rhythm — and gaps or inconsistencies become immediately obvious.
Another version: squint at your text until it blurs slightly. The overall rhythm of the spacing should feel even and consistent. Areas that look denser or looser than the surrounding text need kerning attention.
Kerning is one of those invisible-when-right, glaring-when-wrong design elements. When a logo or headline is well-kerned, it feels professional and considered without anyone being able to articulate why. When it’s poorly kerned, it creates a subtle sense of something being off — a feeling that the brand hasn’t paid attention to detail.
In brand contexts especially, where typography appears at large sizes on signage, packaging, and marketing materials, kerning quality has a direct impact on perceived brand quality.
Kerning is one of the skills that separates designers who understand typography from those who just use fonts. It takes practice to develop the eye for it, but once you start seeing spacing issues, you can’t unsee them — and fixing them consistently is what makes the difference between design that looks good and design that looks professional.
Start with well-kerned professional fonts and you’ve already won half the battle. Explore Burntilldead Studio’s catalog — every font is built with the kind of professional kerning attention that makes your design work easier and your results more polished.
