The kerning of good typefaces is fine for body text. For headlines you should at least consider using manual kerning. But in logo design it is absolutely necessary to kern manually.
What is kerning anyway?
Kerning can be simply described as adjusting the spacing between individual letters.
When you use paid fonts, you can rely on the letterspacing that is set up by default. Especially when you work on your body text, you don’t have to manually adjust it. But when it comes to logo design, you should definitely use manual kerning.
Using uppercase letters followed by lowercase letters, you run into weird combinations that almost always need some manual adjustment. Uppercase letters like T, V, W, and Y can create awkward pairings with lowercase o, e, i, and others.
Even for headlines, manual kerning is a good idea.
How to kern your logo design in Illustrator
In Adobe Illustrator you can adjust the letter spacing via the text menu.
To find letterspacing that suits your needs, you should find one basic space unit first. Find one letterspace that you want to work on and use the text menu to adjust it. After you’ve found the right size, create a rectangle that has the same width. Afterwards copy that rectangle and place it between every pair of letters and adjust them via the text menu as well.
With this method wordmarks and lettermarks can be kerned perfectly.
Can you use different letterspacing in logo design?
Using different letterspacing between pairs in the same logo design (or even the same word) creates a special effect. That effect can bring uniqueness to your logo design which is sometimes even the one element your design needs to work.
But, in my experience, it seldom does.
Most logos need evenly spaced out letters to give the viewer structure and orientation. Only logos for companies using playfulness and fun to sell their products and services could use the chaos unevenly spaced letters create – a good example would be the Baskin Robbins logo, where the letters aren't just spaced out, but also rotated and placed unevenly:
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