Leading, Kerning, and the Resulting Memes

     Leading is the space between the lines of text. It’s a term that comes from Ye Olde days of printing presses and the strip of lead that was placed between the series of metal letter stamps above and those below.

     Kerning deals with the spaces between individual letters. This shouldn’t be confused with tracking (sometimes called plain old letter-spacing) which distributes the space between letters evenly and uniformly.

     And as far as I’m aware the space between words is just called word-spacing. How original.

     These things are very important because if the letter-spacing or word-spacing is not adjusted appropriately there can be some unfortunate results. These unfortunate results (fortunately) have resulted in some very amusing memes.

     So if you’re not looking to become the next big meme, please pay attention to how close or far apart your letters and words are.

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." J. R. R. Tolkien