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I'm new to graphic design and I have this branding project I am working on. I need to know how my kerning is for the dimension given in the picture below;

enter image description here

I'm finding it rather difficult in Illustrator because I can't work as precisely as I can with Photoshop.

Thanks for the criticism.

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  • @Philip Regan thanks for the edit, was not allowed to post images since I am a new user.
    – Jonathan Musso
    Commented Mar 12, 2011 at 18:36
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    With Illustrator you can work really precisely. Just right click on the text and select 'create outline'. Now you can move every letter for its own. And with cmd+k (preferences under general) you can set the 'Keyboard increment' to 0.1px or 0.01px and move the single letters with enormous precision. Hope that helps ...
    – ueberkim
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 20:42
  • Your example is less about kerning, and more about letterspacing (and many would say you shouldn't letterspace that particular typeface to that extent)
    – DA01
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 21:26

3 Answers 3

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Your kerning is fine (the S might need one more pixel to the right), but the font doesn't really work for the design (looks like Helvetica). Perhaps try another sans-serif or slab-serif typeface and experiment with both thin and bold fonts. Some resources you can refer to for inspiration: FontFont, FontSquirrel and Adobe Type. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Good luck!

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  • Thanks. The block is not part of the design - just an example of the width I need works to span across.
    – Jonathan Musso
    Commented Mar 12, 2011 at 21:40
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I would sugest to move W-O and K-S pairs 1px closer. I think font is fine.

example

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  • Thanks mate. I have trouble with using Illustrator. I can't seem to get my grid to work properly like in Photoshop..with pixel precision. Also, how can I make this not so rasterized?
    – Jonathan Musso
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 18:38
  • I can't help you with Illustrator, since I use Inkscape, sorry. But it seems to me, according to the pixelated diagonale lines that you should try snapping text to a grid. If this kind of text is going to be a logo, you should consider "hand" tweaking raster - export text to the raster format without losses (not jpg), and tweak smoothing "pixel-to-pixel".
    – user63
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 18:51
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I'm probably nitpicking here (but then again, that's what kerning is) but the example provided isn't really a kerning issue but rather a letterspacing issue.

Yes, the terms are fuzzy and one could swap them it seems, but I think it's important to try and see the conceptual differences as they really are two different questions:

1) Should this typeface be letterspaced to this extent in this context?

If so...

2) Do it, and now let's look at the kerning issues.

IMHO, the example fails question #1, so getting to issues of kerning is less likely.

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