Readability should come before anything else. Can help give your type a more refined look.It affects readablity (helps it if done right, hurts it if done wrong).Why letter-spacing mattersД«efore I get into some tips and tricks though, I want to just do a quick mention on why you should care about letter-spacing to begin with. For the time being, letвЂ™s look into what you should, and shouldnвЂ™t, use letter-spacing for on the web. People donвЂ™t give typography enough credit! IвЂ™ll save the rest of that rant for another day though. And, have you noticed that theyвЂ™re all typography related? Image thanks to Atlas Obscura.Д®nter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.The Do's and Don'ts of letter-spacing Nov 10, 2018ДЄnother week, another article about something design related! If you missed the past few, I strongly suggest checking them out, as these little things can make a big impact on your overall design. LATER: HereвЂ™s an interesting street sign from QueenвЂ™s New York, set up to commemorate the invention of Scrabble, which took place on this block in 1938. Of course printing from movable types originated in Germany, and to begin with no type faces had an italic form until 1501 when the first one was cut in Italy. * This is because Fraktur/Black letter had no italic form, so that option wasnвЂ™t available. With a constant letterspace, a wider space is likely to cover up more problems than a tighter one will. But variable letterspacing takes time, judgement and thus money, so a constant letterspacing is likely to be much more common.

If youвЂ™re going to put letterspacing in the Cap & lower case Bridge, why skimp on it between i and d? Urban myth holds that road signs are made by prisoners, so perhaps one should not expect too much typographical nicety.Д¬onclusion: if you are going to letterspace your Caps, ideally use a variable letterspace between different combinations of letters, depending on the amount of apparent space they each bring because of their shape.

ThereвЂ™s precious little spacing going on in that word. Rather than Cap & small cap itвЂ™s a Cap S from one size of type, and the rest of the word in a smaller type size, which is reflected in the thickness of the letters as well as their height. It shows rather luxurious spacing for G and W but because they are different words this looks fine.

This sign at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge has obviously been hit by a bus at some point. With caps, letterspacing does enhance readability. Letterspacing lower case type leads to the exact opposite, which is why in German it is used to draw attention to a word, to emphasize it by making you take a little longer reading it.* Road signs need to be read quickly and accurately. Readability is what road signs should be all about, and Cap & lc tends to achieve that end best. I believe it shows the other half of Coracle Press, a poet himself, perhaps waiting for lightning to strike.Д«ritish road signs tend to be Cap & lower case, as are US ones. This picture of a French sign for a place south of Grenoble, not sand cast I think, comes from the same source, and is pretty well letterspaced. The second line suffers from a bit too much space either side of the A but is otherwise pretty good.

So maybe we need to force all public signage back to sand casting, because the letterspacing of the first line is really all one could ask: even and steady - maybe we could do with a bit more between the I and the R at the end. Erica Van Horn, self-described as half of Coracle Press, tweets this picture of a sign in County Tipperary with the comment вЂњOld sand-cast aluminum letters, hence the spacing.вЂќ Equal space between all the letters works out more or less OK here.

Letterspace caps