Monday, 12 October 2015

OUGD403: To kern or not to kern

Intro
12 / 10 / 15

After the crit session on Friday, Simon wanted to focus a session on kerning and how it can be done professionally within industry. Firstly we watched a short video around hand lettering by signage artists in Dublin and there practise of perfecting the spacing between letters.
This lead onto a discussion of certain terminology:
    - Monospace typefaces = preset spacing between letters in a           typeface. E.g on a typewriter.
This came into discussion as most problematic glyphs lie within the letters which taper inwards at the base of the letter. E.g Yy, Ww, Vv. However a typewriter is the perfect example of how the spacing can be controlled between every letter.
There are 3 ways designs can control kerning:
Optical - adjusts spacing between adjacent characters based on their shapes

Metric - uses kern pairs (included in most fonts). Kern pairs contain info about the spacing of specific pairs of letters. Eg. LA, P., To, Tr, Ta, Tu, Te, Ty, Wa, WA, We, Wo, Ya and Yo 

Manual 

Kern Down
12 / 10 / 15

To reiterate what we had just learnt around the influence kerning can have, Simon came up with an exercise he calls 'Kern Down', it involved choosing 5 letters (vowels or consonants) and then creating a brand name to represent different brand types using only kerning to create the context. 
We received the letters m, o, t, k and e...



toke, the nightclub


toke me, the smoke shop


tjoke, the party shop


tjoke 2, the party shop
- we wanted to convey a more playful type by rotating the o and e



A variation of toke, the smoke shop 


Ket, the animal control company lol.


Komet, the luxury car company


Tom K, kids tv program







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