I'm not usually one for such a miserly entry, but this is something short, sweet and to the point that every embroiderer should know. From those of you with a simple lettering program up to full-time digitizers, you can all do one simple thing to make any name, monogram or other assorted text element look its best, and it's something I've found I have to correct more often than not when reproducing the work of my peers. You need to learn to kern.

A quick visit to Wikipedia will tell you that kerning "is the process of adjusting white spacing in a proportional font," but that description alone will not bring this lesson home. Look at the two examples below. Do you notice something strange? I for one would wonder if "DA VID" was a slang term I'd missed along the way to turning 30.

Much as I'd like to coin some new slang, the problem we have here is all about the spacing between the letters. The left side is the standard result of typing the words "DAVID," "WAR" and "FELT" into a standard digitizing program. The right side depicts the same lettering after being manually kerned. Simply put, I moved the "D" closer to the "A" then the "DA" over toward the "VID;" the "W" toward the "AR;" and the "FEL" closer to the "T." This is something for which you have to develop an eye, though I think most of us know intuitively when type is badly kerned. A sense of the letters being cramped lets you know you need more space; an airy or disjointed feeling between letters lets you know you've got too much space.

When I first started, I tried to measure between the letters, making sure that the spacing between the right-most and left-most elements on each pair of letters was identical. As it turns out, that kind of perfectionism can make things look horrible. In the end, you are simply trying to even the area of the space between the letters. For lack of a better description, you just need to move the letters until they don't look too cramped or too airy. Though kerning may not be an issue until you must use one of the cardinal pairs that cause these problems, like the capital A and V shown here, it's imperative that you correct kerning problems when they arise, lest a customer end up with an unwanted new name.