in today's video we're going to be exploring tracking and kerning within
graphic design and how they are different and exactly what you need to
know about tracking and kerning for your variable fee
don't miss out on today's valuable tutorial so first looking at kerning
which is the adjustment of spacing between two individual letters now this
can of course be applied to an entire word or a sentence but it is manual
adjustments of negative space between each letter as a means to make the
typography there more legible visually appealing or both now you can see in
this first VAW example the kerning is quite widely spaced apart and the second
example on the right has a poor kerning because it appears unbalanced some
changes here have ensured the tightly packed kerning option now you need to
consider how tight or how wide the kerning should be for your designs you
need to consider this especially for logo type I'm making two different
options is a good idea one for small scale prints and one for large scale
prints so in illustrator you cannot use an automatic kerning option but there
are some presets you can use but I suggest you should always manually turn
your typography for headings and logo type now to do this create the outlines
of your text illustrator and then ungroup the selection its then just a
case of nudging the characters left or right and I like to zoom out often so I
can get a better feel for the overall kerning well sometimes I unfocused my
eyes so the negative space becomes more obvious
another method is to hold down the shift key and rotate the topography 180
degrees upside down the meaning of the text is now lost which allows some
designers to focus more on the kerning itself rather than the actual wording
here is the Amazon logo which by default has some pretty decent kerning I've gone
ahead and made some minor adjustments below to make a kind of more poor
kerning choice they are minor adjustments but see if you can relate to
how the second option looks worse than the original now the final trick for
kerning is to actually turn your word or sentence in groups of three characters
again this takes away the meaning of the text but also it allows you to focus on
a smaller group which can be easier for some designers you then bring them
together at the very end to form your sentence or your words now kerning is
not an exact science but you just need to adopt an eye for good spatial
awareness between the characters of the typography
so moving on to tracking which is often confused with kerning tracking is the
adjustment of spacing between an entire word sentence or paragraph as a whole
equal adjustments will be made of us it's not a manual process as with
kerning you have less control over the spacing and for this reason it's often
used for large blocks of text such as in magazine articles now in Adobe
Illustrator you can adjust the tracking here fairly easily it is also okay to
use tracking the headings and titles but we're going to come to that soon there
is a keyboard shortcut in illustrator for increasing or decreasing the
tracking by 20 points and that is the alt option key and then just nudging
left and right on your keyboard to show a very quick example of how tracking
could be used for a design let's have a tightly packed Satori here
and then let's increase the tracking on the word graphics below which is going
to offer some nice contrast visually speaking and again there is no science
to this and this is a quick example but it is possible to quickly use tracking
illustrator for such designs however I personally suggest manually kerning any
kind of logos every single time because it's more precise and you have more
control over the final outcome so like I said tracking is ideal for large blocks
of text on magazines or kind of other editorial designs you wanna text to be
legible and say the smaller text at the bottom here would do well with greater
wider tracking than the larger group of text above these are some things that
you need to think about when tracking but another thing to consider is that
tracking is fun dependent now what do I mean by that exactly well here are two
different words and they both have the same value of tracking which is zero if
I adjust the top text option to minus 50 then we can see a more similar spacing
between both text options so there was today's video on tracking and kerning
and if you want to keep expanding your skills and your awareness as a graphic
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