punctum

I came across a Utah company that I have a lot of respect for for many reasons and noticed a weakness in the typography of their corporate logo. Kerning. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, kerning is the space between pairs of letters. Applications like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign have excellent tools for adjusting your fonts to look excellent at many levels. (photoshop on the other hand seems to have significant problems reading the embedded kerning pairs of fonts)

Have you ever looked at a sign and thought, “man, something about that looks really low quality” but couldn’t pin down what the problem was? Even though the fonts were nicely sized, colors tastefully chosen, and correctly spelled, the kerning may have been misadjusted. Viewers make subconscious decisions about reliability and having a logotype or signage well kerned will help clearly communicate quality.

One of the simplest ways to kern a word is to view a set of three letters and compare their spacing, adjust any letters to the proper position for consistent spacing, then proceed to do the same test for the rest of the letter combinations.

There are finer details of kerning that I won’t discuss in this post, but you can help your logotypes read properly by taking extra time to adjust the spacing between the letters. There is never a good reason to overlook kerning when creating a logo that will represent a company and oftentimes be the first way a company is introduced to a new prospect.

As you can see in the example below the original directpointe logotype seems to divide the word into sets of “dir”, “e”, “c”, “tp”, “o”, “inte”. I’ve quickly kerned the type to feel and read better.

I don’t know if you will clearly see it on your screen, but this font also suffers from a slightly heavier “d” and “p” weight. Consistency and craftsmanship in font weight creation can also help text read and feel proper and help the kerning appear more correct.

Exercise files

I’ve uploaded a Illustrator/PDF kerning file for you to work with. The second layer is presently invisible. After you’ve kerned the type, make the layer visible and compare. I’d be interested in seeing your versions.

http://special-1.bl.uk/bindingsdiscovery/ui/BindingsDisplay.aspx?GetAllImages=Y

The “reselect” link is your friend.

Waiting for a train, 9 p.m. ice reflection

-5º, 11 p.m., backlit by moon, Willow tree near Bear Lake Idaho

If you want this External USB Floppy drive, just email me and we’ll arrange shipping details. It works great, but I have no use for it. I’m sure someone could use it to pull off some “long lost” information from their floppy disk.

When we take the time to figure out what we assume, it can unveil opportunities for innovation.

The purpose of the following list is not to say that these changes will make for a better internet experience, or that there aren’t exceptions to these assumptions, but merely to discover what we assume about the dub dub dub.

It is assumed that:

• sites are navigated by clicking on links. What if there were other behaviors to control your user experience
• files from the server is what will load on screen. What if images like “mom.jpg” were accessed from your hard drive and displayed on a web page? What if these images endorsed products?
• pages are navigated with visual feedback. What if items were read or found by aural feedback, or tactile experiences. [Read more]

Although calling photography “freeze frame” could be considered to be redundant, I’m sure you’ll see what I mean when you view Kilmas’ portfolio.

more Julie West Illustration

I mistakenly deleted instead of uninstalled my Photoshop CS3 beta. Go here to get the clean -up script from adobe and run it in terminal mode. When asked what level of uninstall, use level “1″. Once the installation has ran once through, run the script again.

Here is the link to the uninstall script for Photoshop CS3 beta

The link below contains the source code for creating your own custom right click menu in Flash.

custom right click menu in Flash zip download

See it in action here