Spent 3 hours fixing a kerning issue that was just my screen brightness

I was tweaking the spacing on a client's wordmark for what felt like forever, but it turned out my monitor was set way too low and the letters just blurred together. After messing with font metrics and exporting 12 test prints, I realized a simple brightness toggle was the real fix. Has anyone else chased a branding problem that was actually just your hardware lying to you?

2 comments

2 Comments

evand6517d ago

Respectfully disagree on this one. Bad lighting or glare can mess with your spacing judgment, but kerning's usually a real issue that needs a second pair of eyes (or a fresh monitor).

kellyj2316d ago

You're absolutely right, and I've been burned by this more times than I care to admit. I still remember spending an hour tweaking the spacing in a restaurant menu layout, only to find out the next day that my monitor was just reflecting a window behind me. Once I moved my screen to a darker corner, all the "tight" spaces I was fighting actually looked fine. A fresh set of eyes really does catch things you've become blind to after staring too long. I've started keeping a notebook of little kerning fixes I find just by flipping the screen away and looking at it from a different angle the next morning.