Kerning commissions

I'm offering kerning commissions. Never mind, I can't do these for the time being.

What's kerning?

Kerning is a thing fonts have, where problematic pairs have special rules applied to compensate for how they look weird next to each other. Here's an example of kerning: AVAVA LTJ. Notice how the letters kinda slide under each other. This is good. If we didn't have this, everything would look really bad. ... the "keming" meme is hardly relevant, because who would kern the rn pair?

Did I mention I'm an amateur? That these are amateur kerning commissions?

I never professionally learned the art of kerning. And in fact, my style of kerning is probably a lot tighter than a professional would do it. But like, come on man, look at that TJ pair up there. it could afford to tighten up a bit more, don't you think?

Anyway, because I'm an amateur, I'm not going to be charging a professional rate for this.

Why do I even need it?

Sorry for like switching who's asking questions in these headers, I know it's disorienting that 1 and 3 are you but 2 is me.

Chances are if you landed on my website you're probably some kind of artist, and you might've used one of those turn your handwriting into a font websites before! In doing so, you might've drawn a g or y or j with a kinda long descender reaching over to the left and then typed a word with one of those letters in it, like um... adjacent, and been like why does it say ad jacent??? only to realize yeah it's because the j's curly thingy needed some room even though pushing the letters together wouldn't've had em touching.

So yeah, I'm primarily offering this service for handwriting fonts, because if you're like making an actual texty font for text, you can probably do your own kerning.

My current setup allows me to, if I want, export an antiquated outdated old ass prehistoric version of the kerning table with your font, which has complete forwards compatibility buuut is the only form of kern table that lots of versions of Flash ^{sigh, ""adobe animate"""} will take. Something tells me a lot of readers might find that valuable in some way.

I understand that this is pretty niche, but I also think, say, if you're trying to make a comic, it's better to have a lettering font than to hand-write everything. Like, your fucking wrists will thank you in the long run. Of course, for way less money, you could probably just buy a really good lettering font at blambot. So consider doing that instead.

How much will it cost?

I uh don't know. Last time I kerned a font (and kept track of how long I spent doing it) it took me like 6 hours. I wanna make $15 an hour off of this, so that session would probably be $90? That time was a lot more pairs than your average handwriting font though, so probably it would take me less time and I'd charge less. Once I've done more of these, I'll have a better understanding of how much time it takes me per pair to do these, and I'll set up a standard rate. Right now though this is really experimental so just talk to me and we'll figure something out.

Remember that the number of pairs in a font grows areawise, so I'd want to charge by pairs (roughly # of chars squared) as opposed to flat out number of characters.

You can contact me on twitter or discord if we're friends. Or at my business email (see homepage).