Typography is not just picking out a letter font and typing away; there is a whole system and a bunch of specific terms behind it. For example, a professional working with typography might use such terms as leading, kerning, foot, vertex, crotch and swash on a daily basis. Now, we are not going to drown you in stiff scientific language explaining all that, but rather show you what one of these words, kerning, means.

If you'd to check a dictionary, you'd find that kern might mean a yokel, but that's not the meaning used in typography. Kerning basically describes the horizontal spacing between two consecutive characters used in a font. When type was printed using cast metal, parts that needed to overlap adjacent letters hung off the edge. Computer typefaces might have manual, automatic, or no kerning whatsoever for every different font styles; no kerning can make it appear that there is a space between letters, while automatic kerning produces mixed results.

Still wondering why letter spacing is so important? Well, typography design fails can ruin (or make hilarious) even the best thought-out text, as the examples below demonstrate. It turns out that there is only a few millimeters difference between 'clicks' and 'dicks,' 'therapist' and 'the rapist.'

Scroll down below to see these funny fails and more for yourself!