Transcript:
[MUSIC] What’s up, guys? This is Spencer, From Pixel & Bracket In this tutorial, we’re going to be looking at kerning and letter spacing here in Adobe Illustrator. First, I’m going to show you both ways to kind of adjust those values, which is basically the spacing between letters in your text, and then I’ll talk about why you might use one or the other or some instances, and maybe some extra tidbits at the end, but let’s get into it, so I did another tutorial That was like a logo tutorial, but it dealt with shapes and it dealt with more of the theory behind kerning like looking at the volume of space between letters in this one. I’m going to show you. If you have live text how to adjust the letter spacing? So you have two options in your character window? If your updated, you’re going to see the character window over here on the right and your properties panel. If you have a text box selected if you aren’t updated, just go to window down to text or type find type down here and then open up character. That’s command T as a shortcut. You can take this little window and dock it in your toolbar somewhere, and then it’s the little a symbol, and once you have that popped out, there’s two attributes at the bottom here. One of them is to set the kerning between two characters and the other one is to set the tracking for selected characters, so a lot of times kerning has to do with just two characters. So if you’re looking at the L and the E, you’re adjusting the spacing in between and then tracking or letter spacing is generally referred to as across-the-board like all the characters in your text box here, so let’s just look at how to adjust those if we grab this text box, and we set the letter spacing or tracking to something like 50 notice how all of our letters are now spaced out even further and to show you that let’s go up to 100 and now you can see just how much space there is in between each and every letter in our text box that is tracking that adjusts the spacing for either the entire text box or a selected set of text. So if you just have a certain bit of your text that you want to adjust like if I select this piece here, I can just make that piece like 100 and now just that part is spaced out more than other parts. So that’s how you can sort of adjust the spacing. Another quick shortcut is if you have this selected, you can hold option or Alt and press the right and left arrow keys, and that’s going to jump it 20 if you’re looking at the character window over here, you’ll notice that it changes in value by 20 every time you do that another quick tidbit you can adjust the line spacing by pressing up and down, but that’s for another tutorial. Alright, so that is tracking that’s how to adjust the letter spacing for basically a lot of letters, but what about kerning? What about this whole like adjusting in between letters so one thing? I use a lot in ads is learn more like a little learn more button, and when this guy is scaled down because a lot of times, they’re small in in this particular font, like every font’s gonna be different, but in this particular font, when I start to track that out by like 20 we’ll see where that that lands it. Yeah, so even just at 20 you’ll notice and I know this is small, but the E and the A are still super close to each other. Some of the other letters are more spaced out, But when you look at this, they’re not spaced out completely evenly, So if I just highlight the space in between the E and the A and go down here, I can actually Kern or set the amount of spacing in between just those two letters. So if I hold shift and press the up arrow key, it’s gonna adjust by 10 increments of 10 I should say, and if I just keep pressing that, I can sort of bump that letter over, and you’ll notice that all the letters are moving. But in particular, we’re adjusting the space between the E and the A now. If I were to scale that back up, we can see how that’s adjusted even more, and it’s a little bit too much now at this size, so I would back that off a little bit just by holding shift and pressing the down arrow key and just dropping that down by, like, 10 points or pixels, Whichever my values set at so that’s how you can. Kern, the spacing in between individual letters so like just two letters. If you need to kind of spot, Kern, and then if you want to adjust most all the letters or just a selection, I would use your tracking options over here. Also, the same thing works when I have the space selected between two letters, I can hold option and press left, and and it’s gonna bump that in increments of 20 so you can you don’t have to open up your character panel. You can just look in here and be like. Oh, this space between the R and E needs to be bumped out a little bit. Hold option or Alt press, right, and then you, you can just sort of Kern that as quickly as as that. Okay, so that was probably way more long-winded than I wanted that part to be, but basically a lot of times when I get a font, so this font here, if I go back to 0 I pretty much always feel like it’s too close together, so I almost always take this at least to 10 Maybe even 20 almost by default, it just helps add a little bit of space in your body copy. I always like doing that sometimes. Even more, it all depends on the font. Now let’s say this learn more was a header when you’re kerning individually. You really don’t want to sit there and Kern every time, an E and a D or a D and I show up, you got to go through Whoo, and Kern! Those that’s why we sort of track it and we kind of do one mass turn to everything, and then then the the you know, the body copy looks pretty much, okay. There might be a little spot here and there, depending on how how well-built your font is. But when it comes to headers, that’s where you know. It’s a little bit easier to spot current the spacing in between certain letters. So if I wanted this to be bumped out a little bit, remember option or all, I can hit the right arrow key and I can kind of just spot. Kern, some of these. If I want some of them current to be specific values and others. Not, you know if I want to bring that. Oh, a little bit closer to the are. Maybe not to the are. Maybe just to the M. They’re just kind of adjusting the spacing in between individual letters, so you can still have an overall tracking after that, but then each of the Kern, you notice how this doesn’t have a certain value in it. That’s because each of these spaces in between all of these letters are different now, so that’s how you can Kern and adjust the text, both body, copy and headers a lot of times. I save my little spot kerning for headers or big words that I want to look perfect or, you know, when I’m creating banner ads, I gotta get, you know, you’re dealing with such small pixels that you really want it to be read to learn more a button that you know shows up a lot at like this size, and I’m like. Oh, you know, that are on that in are way too close to each other. I need to adjust the spacing individually between these letters. Also, you know, if you’re a real design nut, You are maybe particular about using the word kerning for a certain thing and using the word tracking for a certain thing at the end of the day kerning tracking letter spacing. Don’t worry about if you’re new to this as long as you can communicate what you mean, you’re gonna be. Alright, so don’t worry about, you know what the terminology is that you’re using just know that that’s what those things mean they talk about the spacing between letters. I’m sorry I just saw, this said No, Nuh me, that’s hilarious. Okay, guys, that’s the end of this tutorial. I hope you guys. I hope I covered enough. If you have any questions, let me know. In the comments, subscribe for more tips and tutorials and creative videos, thanks for watching and. I’ll see you guys next time [Music]!