In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the space between two specific characters. Many people might not think about it, but this small detail can be very important. If two letters are too close together or too far apart, a normal phrase can change its meaning completely. Sometimes, these mistakes can be quite funny. To show this, we’ve gathered some of the funniest spacing fails from the subreddit r/keming.
At first glance, r/keming might look like a misspelling. However, it cleverly points to the problem the community discusses. When the letters “r” and “n” are too close, they can look like an “m.” This issue is reflected in the word “kerning,” which becomes “keming” when the letters are squished together.
The term kerning comes from the French word “carne,” which means “projecting angle.” This goes back to the Latin word for “hinge.” The typography meaning started in old print shops. In the past, each letter was made on its own block. Some letters, like the tail of a “j” or the top of an “f,” stuck out past the edge of that block. These parts were called kerns, allowing neighboring characters to sit closer together for a neater fit. Sometimes, printers even had to cut away part of the metal, making the process slow and expensive.
With digital fonts, kerning has become much easier. Most fonts today come with built-in spacing adjustments for tricky pairs, and design software can add or remove space with just a few clicks. Letter spacing is just one small part of typography. The overall design of text plays a significant role in how we take in information.
In 2012, filmmaker Errol Morris conducted an interesting experiment on The New York Times website. He posted a quiz titled “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” that asked readers to decide whether they believed a claim was true. The 45,000 people who took part didn’t know that the quiz was really about something else. Morris wanted to see how people responded to the same passage when it was displayed in different typefaces. Each reader randomly got one of six fonts: Baskerville, Georgia, Computer Modern, Helvetica, Comic Sans, or Trebuchet. It turned out that people were more likely to believe the passage when it appeared in Baskerville.
Typefaces generally fall into two big families. Serif styles, like Times New Roman, have tiny decorative strokes at the ends of each letter. Sans serif options, like Arial, skip them for a cleaner look. For years, the common wisdom said serifs belong in print while their sleeker cousins work better in digital formats.
Sources:
Source: Bored Panda, by Jonas Žvilius