Worst Sign Fails: When Kerning Attacks

Kerning is the adjustment of space between individual letters. It is invisible when done well and career-defining when done badly. Get it wrong on a business card and a client squints. Get it wrong on an illuminated shopfront twelve feet wide and you have accidentally named your business something else, in light, for years. Without further ado.

The Video Store

The canonical case, photographed in the United States and circulated for a decade, is a video rental store called Megaflicks. The name is fine. The name is perfectly respectable. The signwriter set it in a wide sans serif, in capitals, and left the L and the I close enough together that from across a car park they resolve into a single letter. We will not spell out the result. Every reader has already got there, which is the entire problem.

Why it’s weird: nobody involved was careless. The letters are individually mounted, evenly spaced, professionally installed. Even spacing is exactly what causes it. An L and an I sitting at the same interval as every other pair will merge, because the L has a foot and the I does not, and your eye fills the gap.

The Consignment Shop

A second classic of the genre, endlessly reposted: a second-hand childrenswear shop trading as Kids Exchange. Set that in title case with generous letter spacing and it is a wholesome local business. Set it in all caps, tight, as one long run of letters, and it becomes a very different premises indeed. The shop is innocent. The typography is not.

The Therapist Problem

Certain words are simply booby-trapped and no amount of good spacing saves them. Therapist is the famous one, and any business or website that runs the word up against something else has to think about where the reader’s eye will break the line. Directories for counselling services have been designing around this since the web began. There is a whole professional folklore about it, passed between designers the way sailors pass on weather signs.

The All Caps Trap

Here is the pattern behind most of these, because there is one. Capital letters have uniform height and no descenders, which strips out the shape cues your brain uses to find word boundaries. Add tight spacing and the reader has nothing left to break the string with except habit, and habit is filthy. Lowercase would have saved almost every sign in this article. Signmakers reach for capitals because capitals read at distance, and they do, right up until they read as something the owner has to explain to their mother.

The Newspaper Headline Effect

Signs are not alone in this. The same failure haunts headlines set in condensed capitals, where losing the space between two words creates a third word that was never written by anyone. Sub-editors call these crash blossoms when the grammar is at fault and something less printable when the spacing is. The sign version is worse only because a headline is gone tomorrow and a shopfront is amortised over fifteen years.

The Cure Takes Ten Seconds

Every one of these is caught by the same two checks, and neither costs money.

First, print the artwork at postage stamp size and look at it. Small size collapses exactly the letter pairs that will collapse at distance, so the failure shows up on your desk instead of on your building. Second, hand the printout to somebody with a childish sense of humour and watch their face. If they smirk, you have your answer and you still have time to move the L.

The Verdict

We are, obviously, entirely in favour of all of this. A perfectly kerned high street would be a poorer place. Somewhere out there a business owner is standing in a car park at dusk, looking up at their brand new illuminated sign, watching the letters warm up one by one, and slowly beginning to understand. That moment is why we do this.

Check your spacing. Then check it again from across the road, at night, with the lights on, from the angle your customers actually approach from. And if the sign is already up and the joke has landed, our advice is to lean in. Order the T-shirts. It has worked for better businesses than yours.