Is my logo kerned correctly? Especially looking for the areas around the "A" and the "S".
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1@Scott's answer is a good one that leads to a simple rule. Anything about your logo that distracts people from seeing it as a whole object is bad. If you noticed problems with the A and the S, then you already knew the kerning was off and didn't need us to tell you. (Kudos, BTW. You've learned the skill and only need to build your confidence.) Kerning is little more than the artistic practice of removing unintentional distractions to improve the likelihood of intended recognition.– JBHCommented Jul 31, 2023 at 4:07
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The S looks odd to me. Not sure whether it has anything to do with kerning, but it looks as if it's not the same font at all.– MastCommented Aug 1, 2023 at 15:21
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2@Mast: It’s missing optical adjustment. In this font, the S is the same height as the other caps. But especially at large display sizes, curved & pointed letterforms need to extend a few percent beyond the usual baseline and cap height of the typeface, or they’ll look slightly too short. It’s related to kerning, in that both of them are about “visual weight”: a smaller horizontal cross-section contributes less vertical weight, and vice versa.– Jon PurdyCommented Aug 1, 2023 at 16:53
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@Mast: the S looks slightly tilted to me– Thomas WellerCommented Aug 2, 2023 at 17:31
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Your C and S could benefit from a little overshoot. And the "NNE" area feels crowded. I understand the logic of wanting gaps equidistant with the letter thickness, but it can actually make a word of this length less readable. More cognitive load required for line detection when trying to distinguish individual characters or something like that, if you want to get analytical.– MentalistCommented Aug 4, 2023 at 2:22
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2 Answers
Kerning is really more of a "by eye" thing and based almost entirely on opinion. The goal is a smooth shape without any percieved gaps.
I would tighten kerning on both sides of the A and S - pretty much aligning the sides with the previous/next glyph [kerning 0 essentially]. Except for the AN combo - I would leave a hairline between those glyphs, so they don't run together.
I would also move the type a bit closer to the iconography - roughly 1.5x the space between the NNs.
Gaps can often be more easily detected if you turn things upside down... where you aren't necessarily "reading" as much as you are just looking at the shapes.
Again, all merely opinion.
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1Did you identify the typeface for your answer? I couldn't, and wasn't able to try different kerning for an answer. Yours is the right answer IMHO.– user180961Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 20:47
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2@shashin-ka I just used Photoshop to move glyphs using the original PNG - more image editing than type adjusting really. I didn't retype anything. It would have been better to adjust set type.. but I wasn't going to spend the time to try and match the typeface just for this question.– ScottCommented Jul 30, 2023 at 20:53
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thanks! I wanted to try it in Ilustrator but ran out of sans-serif typefaces.– user180961Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 20:59
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12Yo, that trick of turning it upside down to reduce it mentally to "shapes" rather than "language" is genuinely really clever. Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 13:32
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Too much room around A and S. Or it's too tight elsewhere.
Worse: S looks like its rotated and has became too low. Letter C looks too low due its form. Maybe a reason to try different fonts.
Here the letter placements are like I would have them (sorry for messing around the letter forms, too):
How do I prove I'm right? It cannot be proven, it's an opinion.
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1Upvoted for pointing out the letter height mismatch. The original almost looks like it says cANNEsY. If that’s the way the letters are in the font used, I would definitely tweak the C and S manually for the logo. Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 8:17