Kerning

Kerning is the alteration of spacing between letters to improve their appearance overall. Tracking is the spacing between characters in a line of text. The difference is that kerning deals with certain pairs of letters, while tracking refers to letter spacing overall.

I don't expect tattoo artists to have a complete understanding of typography. But the same eye that has to apply a stencil symmetrically—and account for slight rotation—is certainly able to see and adjust letter spacing that is off. Also, there aren't many days that go by without a client coming in and wanting a name, word, or phrase worked up. Over time, this becomes another quick tick to check in the mental list before beginning.

Now that software is beginning to get a handle on this, there are a few options to make sure the kerning is close to perfect. Adobe's programs have some great flexibility, so we'll go over the Photoshop way in this post.

For this example, the letter "W" and the letter "A" have a hard time fitting together properly with most fonts. Let's mess with the phrase below and notice the differences. The first "War&Peace" is set in Bookman Old Style and the kerning hasn't been touched. The second is after Photoshop's Optical Kerning has been applied.

Here's a closer shot of obvious differences with two sets of the letters.

The spacing in the standard text is off; here's the two methods I used to change it:

1. Place your cursor between the letters you wish to correct. Hold down your ALT key then use your arrow keys (left and right) to vary the distance.

2. Or select the entire text. Now, in your Character Palette, pull down the menu in the Kerning box. Instead of Metrical, select Optical. This is Photoshop's fake eye. It mimics how we see and tries to fix everything automatically. There are times this is a little off, when that happens I always revert to the first step.

Related Links:
Kerning at Wikipedia
Thinking With Type kerning examples
Great kerning post at Noisy Decent Graphics