Bad keming: Kerning failures, plus other typographical and font mishaps | Hacker News Reader

Bad keming: Kerning failures, plus other typographical and font mishaps

badkeming.com

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Why does this blog with relatively little content mostly stolen from reddit.com/r/keming keep getting posted here?

1) Because it's name is two words.

2) Because the content is brutally simple to understand.

3) Because dad jokes resonate.

TL;DR) Because meme.

I would rather view it on Tumblr, honestly. IMO the reddit experience has degraded as the business model shifted over the years.

I had my bad kerning / bad font selection awakening when a student asked me after a lecture about Apache Maven what the porn.xml is for.

https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to... avoids lower-casing POM as much as possible for a reason, I think.

I do wonder whether that potential keming issue is accidental or a joke. Does anybody here know?

TIL it stands for "Project Object Model". It sounds like a backronym or made-up name to me.

> made-up name

Are there any non-made-up terms? :)

Onomatopoeias.

Hmm, that's a good one. Although since they're different for every language, I'd argue they still capture the inherent made-upness of language.

There was a great maven blog back in the day, called “hardcore pom”

From the best snl skit

* Whore ads for $100

* The penis mightier

“I’ll play your little game trebek!”

Idk what my point is really. That high and low art share the same source, possibly, but I 100% retconned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaYMoTi2g8

I scrolled, looking for "the rapist", and there it was.

That was a joke on The Benny Hill Show. (More than one time.)

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34id0y

Always will make me think of Arrested Development's Tobias Funke

https://youtu.be/pz8aYiH_nRg

Also on Three's Company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RojeGRiGdhc.

I used to take my jalopy to Clint’s Auto. The sign was handpainted on the building with big, squared letters. The L and the I were a bit too close together in “CLINT’S”, and it always made my inner middle schooler laugh to see it.

FLICK is my ever-childish font-dependent fav.

as a designer myself, I assure you more than half of these are intentional. we dream for these kinds of shenanigans

Or honest space bar accidents. Just as much "not kerning".

The "you have what it takes" is an excellent piece of positivity, because even typography laymen like me can clearly see that it was all done on purpose, giving a soft warm resonance with the message. "You're a good boy, you saw right through the message the expert set up for you"

I'm clearly today's prize idiot, because I cannot spot the joke in the "You have what it takes" one. Can you please help?

It's one of the few entries on the Bad Kerning blog

Years ago I made https://fuckyeahkeming.com/ with the same premise. It had some good ones but after some time it’s just repeats of the same few words/letter combos for the funny ones: li becoming u, cl becoming d.

Other common issues are text being printed in the wrong font (using default letter shapes but the wrong kerning info), missing spaces (“me at” to “meat”) or poor tracking, which is excess space applied to all letters.

I stopped because it started feeling pedantic rather than funny.

I'm afraid to dick on that url!

Fun! Reminds me of the Unnecessary Quotes blog.

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

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