Ignacio Response Draft

> > **Ignacio**
> > Morning Guys.
> > Why's there so much controversy around Adobe's optical kerning? [link to @typographica tweet]
> > > **Typographica**
> > > My full-time job is deprogramming designers who were taught to rely on Adobe's Optical kerning.
> > > Teachers, stop doing this.

Now, i'm not exactly sure _what_ @typographica is attempting to say, but it's one of two things. I'll attempt to explain both, but first, I'm going to explain kerning in Adobe CS products, just as a refresher and context-setting exercise.

Kerning, to distinguish from tracking, is the calculated space between two letters —a "letter pair"— as opposed to all of the letters. There are two basic kerning options in CS products: "Metrics" (aka Auto), and "Optical," each of which do a different thing to create a default spacing for every possible
letter pair (i.e.: every time the pair wv appears). 

Metrics kerning uses the kerning tables provided by the font itself. This is essentially the "as-designed" kerning for the font, and varies widely in quality. A really well-done one will have specific kerning for lots of different letter pairs — not just "the space for every time a round letter like o/p/b is next to an angle letter like w/v" but "here's for bw and here's for pw because they're a little different because descenders" — and will have ligatures, etc. Most font files's kerning tables are not nearly this well done, and rely on a few simple rules that don't account for enough cases. One of the many reasons why free fonts made by amateur type designers seem like a good idea but actually need to be used with caution.

Optical kerning completely ignores the kerning tables (that is, the "metrics") the font came with, and instead uses some algorithm to calculate the same information again. This seems like blasphemy, but it's actually really good at what it does about 90% percent of the time. As a simple part of its due diligence, it will actually account for every possible letter pair in the font, which many kerning tables don't. BUT, it's just Adobe's best guess based on some simple math. It's garbage for script fonts and useless for well-crafted fonts, but if the inbuilt kerning isn't very good, optics kerning will get you much closer to pleasing letterspacing than Metrics/Auto will.

There's also hand-kerning or hand-hinting, which is the manual adjustment of the spacing for individual letter pairs after it's been typed (i.e.: this specific time the pair wv appears), which is also important, especially when you're dealing with large type sizes like headlines, where bad kerning is especially noticeable. As a practical note, you don't need to use the character panel to hand-kern letter pairs. What a pain in the ass that is. You can hand-kern way faster in most CS products by putting the cursor between two letters and then using option-leftarrow or option-rightarrow.

Hand-kerning and even a decent facsimile of optical kerning are still basically impossible on the web without some fancy .js libraries and a lot of patience, which drives me bonkers, but I digress.

So, now that we've got that explanation out of the way, let's address @typographica's tweet. In my interpretation, he could be making one of two completely valid gripes about the state of graphic design education today.

The first is a gripe about respecting the type designer's intent. Esentially, that always relying on optical kerning is a big fuck you to the people that have made these decisions professionally. This is a valid argument, as long as — like @typographica probably is — you're using carefully crafted fonts with extensive kerning tables. The type designer has more familiarity with the font they've created, and so probably knows better than you. 

This is especially true for fonts intended for use as body copy, where the inbuilt metrics are often optimized to provide consistent horizontal rhythm as one scans the page, more than they're for perfect spacing at display sizes. As a type designer, it's probably a safe bet that a designer will go back and hand-fix the kerning problems that typesetting a few words at a very large size will create, rather than hand-fixing the horizontal rhythm of many paragraphs of running copy.

The second is a gripe about care and craft. It's an argument that you've got to care more, to do more. The idea that designers are taught that "flipping the switch to optics" is good enough, that Adobe will take care of making sure the kerning for whatever you typed is good enough. Hand-kerning is never a thing you're not going to have to do at display sizes. 

The difference between someone that cares and sees in enough detail to go past the "do Optics make good typography yay done" to actually visually evaluating and hand-adjusting letter pairs based on the horizontal rhythm of the type is the kind of difference that makes the "Squarespace Logo" thing that just blew up on the internets pretty whatever in my mind. 

It's the difference between knowing how to use a tool and knowing why the tool is made the way it is, why the options available to you are the options available to you; the reason your cousin who's really good at photoshop isn't necessarily a designer. 

I certainly, thankfully, was taught that difference in my design education, but if even some design education isn't teaching that sort of attention, this gripe is one that I 100% can get behind. 

This difference is reason we have designers, and will continue to have them in 100 years, even as more Squarespace Logos continue to pop up. It's important to know, to teach, to learn, because that pride in craft, pride in detail, is what makes good designers good.