Take the letters H H and place exactly 20 units between them.
Now do the same with A V.
Mathematically, the spacing is identical.
Visually, it probably is not.
The H characters have relatively straight vertical sides, so the empty space between them forms something close to a predictable rectangle. The A and V are built from diagonals. Their shapes leave a large triangular area of empty space even when their closest points are relatively near each other.
This is one of the strange things about typography: equal distance does not necessarily create equal-looking space.
It also explains why a company name typed into a beautiful font can still look slightly amateurish when used directly as a logo.
The font might be excellent. Its default spacing might work perfectly in sentences. Yet a six-letter wordmark displayed at 80 pixels high exposes spacing relationships that nobody notices in ordinary paragraph text.
Professional wordmarks are therefore often adjusted letter by letter.
Not because the font designer made a mistake, but because text typography and logo typography are solving slightly different problems.
The Eye Does Not Measure Empty Space With a Ruler
When designers talk about letter spacing, three terms often become mixed together: spacing, tracking and kerning.
Tracking changes spacing across a range of characters.
Kerning changes the relationship between particular pairs.
If you add tracking to the word:
FONTLARKyou are generally increasing or decreasing spacing throughout the word.
If you specifically move the A closer to the R, you are kerning that pair.
Adobe’s current InDesign documentation defines kerning as adjustment between specific character pairs, while tracking changes spacing across a broader selection of characters.
That distinction is important because letters do not create equally shaped gaps.
Consider these combinations:
HH
OO
AV
WA
To
LA
TyThe physical space surrounding each pair is completely different.
Two H characters have flat vertical boundaries.
Two O characters create curved edges, meaning the open area between them expands toward the top and bottom.
An A next to a V creates diagonals that can visually fit inside one another.
A capital T creates an overhanging horizontal bar with large amounts of open space beneath it.
This is why simply measuring the shortest distance between glyphs is not enough.
The eye perceives the overall negative shape between the letters.
Good kerning attempts to make those negative spaces feel balanced rather than numerically identical.
Adobe specifically lists combinations such as LA, To, Ta, Ty, Wa, We and Yo among the kinds of pairs that may require kerning adjustments. Its software also provides an Optical Kerning mode that calculates spacing using the shapes of neighbouring characters rather than relying entirely on predefined font values.
You can read Adobe’s explanation of the difference between metrics and optical kerning in its Illustrator character-spacing documentation.
This shape problem is also why fonts with dramatically different constructions require different spacing strategies.
A geometric sans serif with circular O characters creates different negative spaces from a narrow transitional serif. A condensed display font behaves differently again.
Compare some of FontLark’s sans serif fonts with the serif font collection and type the same short word into both. Even before manually changing any spacing, the rhythm of the word can feel completely different.
Your Font Already Contains Spacing Intelligence
When you type a word in a well-made font, the application is not necessarily positioning every letter using one universal gap.
Each glyph has dimensions that contribute to its default spacing, including areas commonly described through its sidebearings and advance width.
The font can then contain additional instructions for particular combinations of glyphs.
This is kerning data.
In modern OpenType fonts, sophisticated positioning is commonly handled through the GPOS table, which stands for Glyph Positioning.
The official Microsoft OpenType specification explains that GPOS provides precise control over glyph positioning. Pair adjustment is one of the supported positioning operations, and kerning is a common example.
A simplified font might conceptually contain information like this:
A + V = move closer
T + o = move closer
W + a = move closer
L + T = adjust spacingThe actual data does not look like this, but the principle is similar.
The type designer has anticipated combinations whose default sidebearings would produce awkward results.
Modern fonts can go further by using class-based kerning.
Instead of defining every single combination individually, glyphs with similar shapes can be grouped into classes.
For example, accented versions of A may behave similarly enough that they can share positioning logic.
Microsoft’s OpenType glyph-processing documentation explains that GPOS kerning can use predefined classes of glyphs with similar shapes and spacing requirements. This makes extensive kerning more manageable in fonts containing large character sets.
So when a designer changes the kerning manually, they are not usually correcting a font that contains no spacing intelligence.
They are overriding a general-purpose spacing system for one very specific piece of typography.
That distinction matters.
A font designer might need the sequence AV to work reasonably well in thousands of possible sentences, sizes and applications.
A logo designer only needs it to work perfectly inside one particular brand name.
Why Logos Often Need Different Kerning From Normal Text
Imagine designing a font that will eventually be used for books.
Your kerning needs to create comfortable, repeatable rhythm across paragraphs containing millions of possible character combinations.
Now imagine designing the wordmark:
AVORAYou only have five letters.
They may appear in exactly that sequence for the next twenty years.
They may be displayed across storefronts, packaging, websites, advertisements and signs.
The requirements are completely different.
A tiny imbalance between the A and V that would disappear inside a paragraph may become painfully obvious when the word occupies half a billboard.
This is why Adobe specifically notes that manual kerning is useful for precise typographic control in headlines and logos. Its 2026 InDesign kerning guide distinguishes between metrics, optical and manual kerning and recommends manual adjustment when precise control is required.
Wordmark designers sometimes go further than spacing.
They may:
- Shorten the arm of a letter
- Extend a crossbar
- Move one character vertically
- Reduce the width of a glyph
- Join two letters together
- Create a custom ligature
- Alter terminals or curves
- Redraw one character completely
At this point the designer is moving beyond normal typesetting and toward custom lettering.
This can also help make a brand more distinctive.
Anyone can download the same font. The particular relationships between letters inside a customised wordmark can become specific to the identity.
Display fonts often provide particularly interesting starting points because the shapes already contain stronger visual characteristics. Browse FontLark’s display fonts and try typing short fictional brand names into several of them.
Then ignore the font name and look only at the empty areas between the letters.
You will probably start noticing gaps that previously seemed invisible.
There is also research suggesting that letter spacing affects how efficiently words are visually processed, although results vary according to context and the amount of spacing used.
A study published in Acta Psychologica found that a small increase in interletter spacing produced faster word-identification responses than default spacing in the experimental conditions tested.
More recent neurological research also suggests that compressed spacing can interfere with early orthographic processing. A study published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience found differences in neural responses and reaction times when letter spacing was condensed.
These studies concern reading rather than logo aesthetics, so they should not be interpreted as evidence that logos need wider spacing.
They do, however, reinforce a broader point: the spatial relationship between letters affects how we perceive written forms.
Spacing is not empty decoration.
How to Kern a Wordmark Without Relying on Numbers
The most useful way to kern a logo is surprisingly low-tech.
Stop reading the word.
Look at the shapes.
When we recognise a familiar word, the brain becomes very good at ignoring small typographic imperfections. Designers therefore use several techniques to temporarily stop themselves from reading normally.
One approach is to zoom out or squint at the wordmark.
Adobe recommends visually balancing the spaces between letters and suggests squinting so that attention moves away from individual letter details and toward the negative spaces between them. Its letter-spacing tutorial also suggests rotating display text 180 degrees so designers can treat the characters more like abstract shapes.
That upside-down technique can be remarkably useful.
Instead of seeing:
FONTLARKand immediately reading the brand name, you begin noticing groups of black shapes separated by white gaps.
Look for one gap that feels like a hole while the others feel compact.
Then adjust that pair.
A simple workflow is:
- Choose the typeface first. Do not try to solve a fundamentally unsuitable font entirely through kerning.
- Set approximate overall tracking. Decide whether the word should feel compact, neutral or spacious.
- Examine pairs individually. Look especially closely at diagonal, curved and overhanging characters.
- Ignore identical numerical values. The goal is visually equivalent negative space, not equivalent coordinates.
- View the wordmark upside down or blurred. This reduces the tendency to simply read the word.
- Check several sizes. A spacing relationship that feels elegant on a large artboard may become unclear when the logo appears in a mobile header.
One useful mental trick is to imagine pouring water into the spaces between the letters.
You are not trying to make every container the same width.
You are trying to make the amount of negative space feel reasonably balanced.
That is why a pair such as AV may overlap horizontally while still looking comfortably spaced.
Meanwhile, two vertical letters might require physically more distance even though their outlines appear further apart numerically.
It is also why automatic optical kerning can be helpful without always being final.
Adobe explains that optical kerning calculates spacing from adjacent character shapes, whereas metrics kerning uses the spacing information built into the font.
Both provide good starting points.
Neither knows the exact visual identity you are designing.
A wordmark may intentionally be extremely tight. Another may use generous spacing as part of its personality. A third may connect two letters to create a recognisable symbol.
There is no universal number that defines correct logo kerning.
That might sound frustrating in a design tool filled with precise numerical controls.
But it reveals something interesting about typography.
Fonts are mathematical objects built from coordinates, curves and positioning data, yet the final judgement is perceptual.
The software can tell you that two letters are 80 units apart.
Your eyes decide whether they look balanced.
That is why the best spacing is often technically uneven.
Explore fonts on FontLark or experiment with our serif, sans serif and display fonts. Try typing the same five-letter word in each and pay attention to the spaces rather than the letters.
You may never look at a wordmark quite the same way again.
Research Sources
- Adobe InDesign: About Kerning and Tracking
Adobe’s current documentation explaining metrics kerning, optical kerning, manual kerning, tracking and common character pairs requiring spacing adjustment. - Adobe InDesign: Adjust Kerning Between Characters
Updated 2026 documentation covering metrics, optical and manual kerning and their use for precise typography. - Microsoft OpenType Specification: GPOS Glyph Positioning Table
Primary technical documentation describing pair adjustment, glyph positioning and the OpenType mechanisms used to implement modern kerning. - Microsoft: OpenType Glyph Processing
Technical explanation of class-based kerning and how OpenType positioning data can efficiently handle large groups of related glyphs. - Adobe: Change Letter and Line Spacing
Practical typography guidance covering optical spacing, problematic character combinations and techniques for visually evaluating negative space. - Perea, Moret-Tatay & Gómez: The Effects of Interletter Spacing in Visual-Word Recognition
Acta Psychologica research examining how changes in interletter spacing affected visual word-recognition performance. - The Effect of Inter-Letter Spacing on the N170 During Visual Word Recognition
Recent cognitive neuroscience research examining how condensed and expanded spacing affect early orthographic processing.
Research note: Studies of reading and word recognition are included to demonstrate that letter spacing affects visual processing. They do not establish a single ideal spacing value for logo design, where aesthetic, branding and perceptual considerations differ from continuous reading.