The other one that you might be wondering about is baseline shift.Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based graphic design, editing, and drawing application program that has become the industry standard for graphic design professionals. You’ll start mentally adjusting the kerning in restaurant menus and on billboards and bus advertisements. It’s one of those things you can go your whole life without noticing but once you finally see the light you’re ruined. Kerning might seem ridiculously meticulous and not worth the effort, but it’s absolutely something you should be paying attention to as a designer. Letters like “V” that don’t make a nice block shape are particularly bad and almost always have to be adjusted to avoid awkward spacing. One of the most important places to keep an eye on is the spacing between uppercase and lowercase letters.

I purposely didn’t highlight where the adjustments have been made so you can learn to spot the areas that need addressing. The example on the top is the way Illustrator places the text by default and the example on the bottom shows the same example with some manual kerning adjustments. A good old fashion pair of human eyes is simply the best tool at your disposal for making these adjustments. Unfortunately, the peculiarities and unique qualities of each font cause perfect letter spacing to be quite difficult to hard program into software. Why kern? The biggest rookie mistake you can make with typography is to assume that Illustrator, Photoshop, or any other app will spit out perfectly spaced type by default. Illustrator on the other hand is brilliant at displaying vector graphics at various levels of zoom (way zoomed out it gets a little messy but still better than Photoshop). Photoshop will show you a decent preview at 100% (Command+1) but at almost any other zoom level the text looks like crap and is not at all a good indication of what your final output will look like. As you can see, Photoshop is choppy and ugly while Illustrator is smooth and beautiful. The left shows the Photoshop preview and the right shows the Illustrator preview. This is a side-by-side comparison of two windows that I had open, each with a similar block of copy.

Illustrator typography design