10 typography tricks every designer should know

In this article, we’re going to reveal some typography tips and tricks that you can use to boost your design skills and impress friends and colleagues. But before you even begin getting into the intricacies of setting type in the likes of InDesign, it’s important to know the basics.

If you need a refresher on type terms then check out our article What is typography? Learn the basic rules and terms of type! For this article, though, the most important thing you need to know is the difference between kerning and tracking. Kerning is the spacing between specific pairs of letters, whereas tracking works across a range of characters or even paragraphs or whole documents.

Kerning is a fine art – and one you can quickly get good at using both InDesign’s tools and some tricks in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. In InDesign or Illustrator, you can adjust kerning by selecting the Type tool and clicking on the gap between two characters, before holding down Alt/Opt and using the left and right arrows to adjust the space between them. By default the increment applied with each press of the arrow is 20 thousandths of an em, but you can adjust this preference for tighter control.

Once you’ve got the hang of that, read on to discover how you can take your typography skills to the next level…

Why would you want to kern character pairs upside down? Because this enables you to see your letterforms and the space between them without actually reading the words – bringing meaning to them. If you’re doing something fancy with the kerning based on the meaning, it won’t work, of corse, but otherwise it’s a well-used and tested technique and one you should try if you’re struggling with kerning character pairs.

Another tested technique is to either blur (perhaps take a screenshot and blur it in Photoshop – or more likely squint a little bit) Like Brian Hoff says in this excellent article (See more expert kerning tricks in this brilliant article from Brian Hoff.) “I like to blur my eyesight a bit by squinting or crossing my eyes. This enables me to focus on the contrast and white space of the letterforms without becoming distracted by the characters themselves.” It’s a great technique – and you’ll learn many more from Brian’s excellent tips.

Another, perhaps more abstract kerning tip (and one designer Tom Sewell taught us a long time ago) is to imagine that between each letter there are balloons of equal size and volume, forcing the letters apart. As Tom told us, “aim to space the letters so that the balloons fit exactly between them without being squeezed out above and below”. It’s an interesting technique, and one that can prove very handy.

Another tip is to always consider the spaces before and after the word you’re working on and ensure that they are spaced correctly visually. A good rule of thumb is to imagine that the character ‘o’ sits between each word (thanks again to Tom for that one).

In headlines, kerning and tracking is most obvious – so it’s essential to get it right. And sans serif fonts can accentuate your mistakes.

When working with sans serif headlines, make sure you get a rough tracking before you kern. If you have to put -10 kerning between almost every character combination, you should be using tracking at -10 before you do your individual character spacing.

This works for numbers too. The numeral ‘1’ with anything before or after it – ‘213’, for example, or even a space – will always benefit from a tighter kern. More than one ‘1’, for example, combinations such as ‘11’, need really tight kerning.

There’s a new rental service in town – and it rectifies the age-old problem of trying fonts to their full capacity before you pull the trigger and purchase. That service is called Skyfonts from Monotype and enables you to try any font from its library for five minutes, for free.

You can also use credits to rent a font for a day or a month – depending on your needs. Sure, many foundries enable you to test out characters on their site, but it’s not the same as trying them out in your preferred layout/design app. After all, the feeling of a particular font can be hard to find until you start combining words.

Unless you’re after a specific effect (or working on an illustrated piece) don’t stretch, skew or otherwise alter fonts by messing with their dimensions after turning to outlines. You wouldn’t stretch a photo or refined vector piece and you can often end up with an ugly, amateurish result. If you’re going to edit a font, make sure it’s with good reason, and make sure you don’t ruin hours of the type designer’s work.