Kerning, adjusting the letterspacing between two consecutive letterforms, takes a great deal of patience and remains one of the most important typographic skills to cultivate. Most of the high quality, professional fonts, have excellent kerning out of the box. In professional design applications like Adobe InDesign, fonts like Erik Spiekermann’s iconic FF Meta will adjust optical kerning the a click of the mouse via complicated algorithms for specific problem letter pairs like “AV“. However, even the best fonts still need some love when working with an obtuse string of characters.

Enter KernType, the kerning game. Crafted by interaction designer Mark McKay, this beautifully designed and exquisitely engineered web application gives you notoriously difficult words (how I’ve often labored with the word “Type” in setting branding materials for this site!) that progress in difficulty and allows you to kern them, showing your placement against the suggested kerning.

Check it out at type.method.ac.

(Via @timahrens)

Further Reading

• “The Three Letter Approach to Kerning” by Ilene Strizver
• “How to Kern Type [Well]“ by Cameron Moll