How's Your Kerning?

Kerning, as you all know, is the art of digitally moving type (at larger, display sizes) so that the spaces between the letters in any given word appear even and proportionate.

At a small scale (like this) irregularities are hardly noticeable but at larger sizes, and with problem letter combinations (like VA, AV etc.), kerning is often a necessity (see below).



Imagine our delight therefore, when our ever-faithful Dubai correspondent, Mr Chris Hunt (33) pointed us in the direction of a website devoted to the noble art of kerning. This is actually a highly educational and fun, kerning 'game' which even scores your feeble attempts out of a possible 100!  

Klick HERE to go to the KERNTYPE game.



Competitive as ever, the Grillust™ team immediately decided to hold a 'Kern Off', something we would encourage you to do with all of your friends and family.

The rules are simple. Don't practice at all, seriously don't; that would be cheating. Play with the introductory page all you like (to get your head around how it works) and then play the game. Make a screen grab (shift + cmd + 4 on a Mac) of your final score and let us know how you did in the comments section below.

You can go back and play as many times as you like afterwards but in terms of scoring, your first attempt is the only one we're interested in. We'll trust you to be honest...

"How did we do" I hear you ask? 

Well, the graphic designers amongst us were slightly embarrassed when they discovered that the top score had been posted by an illustrator! Here's bearded, charismatic, Scottish illustration lecturer Dwayne Bell's (33) top score of..

 

Closely followed by beadred, charismatic, English graphic design lecturer Jim Millington's (33) second place score of...