Lately, I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to type design. One recurring challenge is spacing and kerning—that is, the precise definition of the spaces between letters.
(A quick explanation: Spacing involves setting the general left and right sidebearings of letters, while kerning fine-tunes the spacing of specific letter pairs, such as To or ff.)
Although modern automatic tools can handle much of this process, manual adjustments are still necessary for each new typeface. The best way to do this is by setting sample text in the new font and iteratively refining letter pairings—especially in the context of actual words.
I’ve long wished for a tool that could generate these kinds of test texts, so I built my own JavaScript application, which runs in the browser. The code is open source and available on GitHub. A working demo to play around is here: https://scinotes.org/kerner/
Typography Experiments
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (such as here and here), I frequently work with Glyphs. I love the tool, but sometimes the joy of experimentation gets a bit lost in the process.
For smaller or more experimental projects—especially those with a more handwritten feel—I turn to Fontself. Below are a few impressions from my current work in progress and from some quick sketches.
