The hard thing about kerning a word is that you know what it says, and so the subtleties of bad character spacing aren’t immediately apparent. She suggested turning the type upside down, that way you don’t read the word, you merely look at the shapes the characters make and the space that’s created between them.
Brilliant advice from Maggie Lewis, former Head of Typography at J. Walter Thompson (as told by designer Rob Sutton). The other benefit to this method is that when flipped, you can more clearly manipulate the spatial relationships between letterforms like T, V, and W that tend to take up more space on top than at the bottom. I will definitely be adopting this technique going forward.
[ via Typecast Creative ]
