Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to go over kerning,
tracking, and leading and what they are, and I'm going to give you a couple of easy ways
to remember which is which. All right, let's get started. Ok, so kerning, tracking, and leading
are three ways to adjust your type to improve readability and just help the type look nicer.
Also, the keyboard shortcuts I'm going to tell you about in this video, work across all three
major design programs, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. I'll be showing you these
in both Illustrator and InDesign, though. We're not going to touch Photoshop today. So let's
tackle kerning first. When you kern your text, you're adjusting the space between two letters.
The way I learned kerning by my professors was to imagine sand being poured in between the letters.
So you want to have the same amount of sand between each letter, although honestly, I think a
better way to think about it is visual spacing. Do some letters seem to be too far apart, and others
just look too close together? If so, you'll want to adjust the kerning. So in this example, I think
maybe the n and the i look pretty far apart. So I'll put my cursor between them. And I'll
hold OPT and then use the left arrow. That's ALT and the left arrow on a PC. So I'll adjust this
too a little bit. It's not a very obvious example, because this font looks pretty nice to begin with,
but let's look at the word HAVE. the H and A look pretty good, but the A and V are really spaced too
far apart, and this is a common problem in almost every font. The A and V are just a little too far
apart. So I'm going to hold OPT or ALT and use my left arrow to move these in just a little bit.
You can also come up here to your Character panel, and you'll see a V/A right here. Now
if you're not seeing that, you'll probably want to go to Show Options on the fly out right here.
So we can also highlight this and use our up and down arrows to really just nudge it and a little
bit. If you're not seeing your Character panel or any of these other panels, you can come up here
to Window and then come down here to >Type and >Character. It's kind of hidden. Kerning can be
pretty tricky because it's somewhat subjective. One way to check your kerning is to just rotate
your whole word upside down. It helps you to kind of see the letters as shapes, and you can see big
gaps a little easier that way. And then you can kern while it's still upside down if you want to.
And once you're done, just rotate it back around. And the way I'm doing that I'm first selecting it
with the Selection tool. I'm getting out here beyond the Bounding Box, and then just rotating
and holding SHIFT to get it back the other way. Now, if you want to practice your kerning,
there's actually a really cool game that will help you with it. And it's called Kern Type. And here
it is. With this game, the first and last letters, you can't move them but all the other letters you
can move so that everything is kerned correctly. So we'll just move this over, maybe like this. And
we'll say Done. And then it'll show you what the best kerning or what they think the best
kerning is. So the blue is where I should have ended up, and it says I got a 78 out of 100.
So if we go into the next one, we'll get another example. I go just maybe a little in. I don't want
to come too far in. Normally, I would probably do something like this, but you don't want to go
past this level very far. Maybe right here. Ok, so it thought I should go a little bit further,
but I got the P almost perfect. So you can play around with this kerning game. Ok,
so the way I remember that this is kerning is, I say I want to add a little kernel of space between
the two letters. So I actually have a little corn kernel out here. And we'll just put that in there.
You can always remember to add a little kernel of space kernel-kerning. Yeah, that's how I remember
it. It might be goofy, but it helps me. Oh, and by the way, I got this little corn kernel
from Vecteezy.com. Ok, so next step is tracking. Tracking is the space between all the letters in
a word, or in between a few letters at a time. So one way to adjust this, I can just click on the
whole text box and then hold OPT or ALT and use my right and left arrows to track out that whole word
or track it in. And probably most people don't refer to this as tracking in and out. They'll say
increase the tracking or decrease the tracking. So tracking in your Character panel is going to
be this one here, which is also a V and an A, but it's got a whole lot of letters highlighted.
So if we want to change the spacing between these three letters, we can highlight those and
track those out a little bit using the right and left arrow keys with the OPT and ALT held down.
And you'll notice over here in your Character panel that this is moving by increments of 20.
And that is a setting you can change. If you go into your Preferences, and then go to Type,
here's where you can set how much it'll jump at a time by using your left and right arrow keys. So
Illustrator will actually allow us to track this really, really far in. Let's see what happens if
we go to a negative number. It will let us track it negatively, but not too far. We get a minus
1000, and we're maxed out. But we can track out further than 1000. I'll just put this back at
zero. Now a common time when I use tracking is for secondary lines on logos, like this one:
Corn Industries. So I'll just select INDUSTRIES. And I've got this
centered, which you can do right up here in Paragraph right here.
And then I'll hold OPT and use my right arrow and just move it all the way out to the edge
of the word CORN... may move it over a little bit. So I use tracking a lot in this case. Now to show
you leading, I'm going to jump over to InDesign because when I work with full paragraphs, and use
leading, I'm most often over here in InDesign, although I do use it in Illustrator a lot too.
So leading is the space between your lines. So if you want to increase the vertical spacing,
all you have to do is hit T, get into your paragraph and highlight a little, and then
I'm going to select all with CMD A. And I'll hold OPT and then just use my down arrow or my up arrow
to increase or decrease the leading. So you can do this by just selecting some text also. And then
holding OPT or ALT and the down arrow, and you can see which lines it's changing. It's all the
ones that I selected. And you can also see it over here in your Character panel. It's the A with the
A underneath. When you hold OPT and use your arrow keys, you can see it changing over there. And it's
nice because you can get in here and fine tune it. So let's say you only want to move it a tiny bit,
so we'll get rid of the .4, and it just moves it slightly. Now there are two ways to remember
that leading is the vertical spacing. First the actual way: Back in the day, whenever typesetters
would want to increase the spacing between their lines, they would actually insert pieces of lead
between the text blocks. So that's why it's called leading. And then the way that I remember it,
I like to think of adding a lead weight to the text itself pulling it down. So I added this
little lead anvil to show you what I mean. So when we select our text and hold OPT or ALT and
use the down arrow, that lead weight is pulling the text down. Yes, I know it's extremely dorky,
but that's how I remember it. All right, I hope this video has helped you learn a little more
about typography and how it relates to graphic design. And if you liked the video, please click
on the Like button. And I'll see you next week with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!