Day 14: Kerning by Eye

Kerning adjusts the space between specific pairs of letters. Software spacing is designed for reading sizes; at poster sizes, awkward gaps between letters like A and V, or T and o, become visible. Good kerning balances the area of space between letters, not the distance between their edges. You learn it by looking, not by measuring.

Objective. Train your eye to see and correct uneven letter spacing at large sizes.

Set one word of at least seven letters very large on a poster and kern every pair by eye.

Choose a word with awkward pairs — for example WAVELENGTH, TOMORROW or AVALANCHE.

• One word, set as large as possible
• Kern every letter pair manually
• Black and white
• Include a tiny “before” version of the default spacing somewhere on the poster

• Even optical rhythm across the word
• A visible improvement over the default spacing
• Clean, confident composition

Repeat the exercise with all-lowercase letters, then compare the challenges of each.