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When to Letterspace Your Text?

Sometimes asking an oddly obvious question helps clarify things for me. Here is one: when to letter-space my text?

If you ask a type designer which part of their job that they enjoy the least, 99% of the chance you will get the answer “spacing and kerning.”

Spacing refers to the process where type designer nudges the left and right space of the letterform within the bounding box in increment of 1/1000 em. Putting the unit in context, if the font size is 20px, the type designer is making micro design decisions on the 0.02px level to make sure the letters are distributed evenly when you set it without any letter-spacing.

After spacing, there are still letter combinations that don’t look evenly spaced when they are set adjacent to each other, for example, A and V. Kerning refers to the process where type designer applies special treatment to these letter combinations, to subtract or add space between them specifically, in addition to the spacing.

All these painstaking processes are to make sure when typographers use their typeface to set paragraph text with default setting without any custom letterspacing, they get a nice, optically evenly-distributed text that is easy to read.

So how dare you to letterspace their beautiful work?The painstaking processes of spacing and kerning is geared toward providing a comfortable reading text, which consists of mostly lowercase letters. Famous American type designer Frederic Goudy once said “Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep,” and German type designer Erik Spiekermann resonates in his book Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works. However, you should and need to letterspace your text when you text is ALLCAP, or when you use the typeface in a way that is not its intended use.

Type designers usually don’t space and kern their typeface to be set in ALL CAP unless they specified so. Most typefaces are designed to be set comfortably in sentence case. Uppercase letters are spaced to be used optimally in combination with lowercase, but when they are set together with other uppercase, they need more breathing room with their giant peers.

Space between the two legs of ‘H’, and space between two adjacent ‘H’ should be equal.

Space between the two legs of ‘H’, and space between two adjacent ‘H’ should be equal.

Set a row of HHHHH, start adding letterspace until the Space between the two legs of ‘H’, and space between two adjacent ‘H’ are equal. The letterspace value you end up with is where you can start with (or end with) on letterspacing your uppercase text.

Type designers also space and kern their typefaces for its intended use. Typefaces intended for display text such as billboard or big titles will have much tighter spacing than typeface designed for body text. One example is Helvetica, while the letterform is steady and neutral, seeming perfect for paragraph text, its spacing, being “tight but not touching, is targeted at display sizes. Type professionals tell you Helvetica is not a good body text typefaces for this reason. If you have to use Helvetica for body text for some reasons, you should at least add letter-spacing.

Space between the two legs of ’n’, and space between two adjacent ’n’ should be equal.

Space between the two legs of ’n’, and space between two adjacent ’n’ should be equal.

Set a row of “nnnnn”, start adding letter-space until the space between the two legs of ’n’, and space between two adjacent ‘n’ are equal. The letter-space value you end up with is where you can start with (or end with) on letter-spacing your display typeface for body text.