I had an epiphany today.

Teaching the lettering segment of my Sequential Arts class at Hussian School of Art, I covered some of the basics of lettering — both hand-lettering and digital lettering.

During the course of the lecture, I described how letters have “push” and “pull” that affects their kerning. Letters that trap a lot of white space (O, Q, D, for example) push other letters away a little bit. And letters that are skinny (I, J, T and L, for example) tend to pull their neighbors in a little.

I pushed further by saying that the main mistake novice letterers make with letters such as T, J and L is that they make the horizontal aspects of those letters too wide.

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