Typography tutorial
Leading, Tracking and Kerning
At Turquoise Creative we love typography and we thought you might be interested in learning some typography principles yourself.
When designing layouts and adjusting type, it is important to understand the basics of working with text, line spacing, and letter spacing. This article briefly covers leading, kerning, and tracking for you to consider in your next piece of work.
Leading
When working with a paragraph, or just more than one line of type, leading is the distance between the baselines in the paragraph. A baseline is an imaginary guideline that type sits on. The standard proportion of leading to type size is typically 120%. So if the type size is 20 points, then the standard leading would be 24 points.
Kerning
Kerning is an adjustment of space between two specific letters. The idea of kerning is to create a consistent rhythm of space within a group of letters and to create an appearance of even spacing between letters. Fonts have exact amounts of spacing between letter combinations already built into it, which is called Metric Kerning. Type takes on Metric Kerning as a default.
As type gets larger and closer to a headline size, those letter combinations, or kerning pairs, don’t work as well. If a selection of type is changed to Optical Kerning, InDesign (or whichever program is being used) will adjust the kerning automatically. However, most designers don’t find this is as useful as using Manual Kerning.
Manual Kerning – One helpful way to look at kerning is imagining that each space between kerning pairs is filled with liquid, and the same amount of liquid should put poured into each space.
Tracking
Kerning should not be confused with tracking, which refers to the uniform spacing between all of the letters in a group of text. By increasing tracking in a word, line of text, or paragraph, a designer can create a more open and airy element.
In blocks of text or paragraphs, tracking is usually only increased by a small amount, because the legibility can become difficult. In that case, it is used more subtly and sometimes to fill space. And using negative tracking can be used sparingly to help create a shorter line of text. In smaller amounts of text or single lines, tracking can be increased in greater amounts and can often help the font take on entirely different design quality.
These typography principles of leading, kerning, and tracking can be seen in our portfolio. If you think your marketing material could benefit from a make-over please call Turquoise Creative.