The spacebetween thelettersis where designlives.

When we set type, we're not distributing characters — we're distributing the white space between them. Every letterform has a visual weight center optical center ≠ geometric center that doesn't correspond to its geometric midpoint. An uppercase H sits differently in space than an uppercase A, even when both occupy the same bounding box.

“The space between letters isn't empty. It's the other half of the letter.”

— Erik Spiekermann, Stop Stealing Sheep

This is why professional type designers spend weeks on a single glyph's sidebearings. The left and right margins of each character are as deliberate as the stroke itself. When you kern a headline manually Alt + ←/→ in Figma, you're not correcting the software — you're finishing the type designer's conversation.

Fig. 1 — Kern pairs from the Masthead specimen archive, marked with optical correction

The three most problematic pairs in Latin type are AV, To, and VA. They're problematic not because type designers got lazy — they're problematic because their shapes create diagonal counters counter = enclosed white space that trap more visual air than their bounding boxes suggest. You feel the gap before you see it.