Tricks of the Trade: Letter-Spacing

Letter spacing is a simple trick of the design trade. Does text sometimes just looks nicer and you can't really put your finger on why? Most likely, if the text is written in Uppercase, the reason it looks nicer sometimes opposed to others is the fact that it has been spaced out. When fonts are created, they are created to combine both uppercase and lower case as seen in a sentence. They are not designed to use all in Caps, therefor the spacing between words written in all Caps is not enough.


By supplying the letters with a little more breathing room (in this case, 140 pts of breathing room) It allows each letter to be seen instead of crammed up against the last. Over spacing is also a problem though and should be used in moderation. I love when such simple changes have such a great effect!