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[A lame poll? If lame, don't comment. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."...
If the animated rabbit, as well as the legions of the mindless, had said "If you can't say something, don't say anything at all." it would have played better, don't you think?
That there's a special hell for people who attempt to fend off criticism by drawing that lame phrase notwithstanding, back to kerning.
Kerning is a term for something that should seldom happen with a properly constructed font file. Idiots who slide an 'A' under a 'V', push a lower case character back under the arms of an uppercase 'T', and jam lower case characters together in lieu of traditional ligatures have not a clue as to the basic unit of type setting, the type body.
The type body is the rectangle that contains the character. It can be larger than the character or ligature but, in most cases, it cannot be smaller. Unless you have some actual reason, as in some sort of unique design element, the type body is never violated.
This means that each character owns its own bounding rectangle and no part of any other character may share any portion of that space. Very simple. Moreover, numeric and some special characters are always on identically sized type bodies. This is so that columns of numbers look like columns of numbers.
Unfortunately this fundamental principle is unknown to the vast majority of those who dubiously style themselves 'designers'.
This visual tradition has been in effect since the invention of moveable type which is functionally since the beginning of the printed word. The entire human race has been looking at type conforming to this rule for centuries. Any invasion of space by one character on another looks odd.
For example, just right now I glanced down at my desk and there sits a flyer for Minwax Gel Stain. That's what is says right there on the front. The 'Gel Stain' is set in upper and lower case in some flavor of Roman. But some moron, no doubt a recent college graduate, has slid the 'l' in 'Gel' over to the left such that the bottom left serif on the 'l' lies slightly under the lower right arm of the 'e'. Violating the 'e's bounding rectangle. You certainly can read it, but it doesn't look at all right.
Reading something and seeing something are two entirely different things. Reading is, for most people, inference. Tht's wy yu cn rd ths. Seeing is seeing.
