Who said there's a problem with the kerning? What did they say the problem is?

I did this with Photoshop cutting each letter as if it where a slug and moving them that way.

This might be to tight for your taste but I think it reads a s a unit better.

The whole point about kerning is to get the letters to make a uniform line without noticeable gaps or holes.

This is only something that can be done with a carefully trained eye and some careful experimenting.

My favorite experts on typography and calligraphy are Edward Johnson, Eric Gill, Adrian Frutiger and Jan Tschichold – not necessarily in that order.

Any information you can glean from their work and writings will certainly put you on the right track.

Obviously some letter pairs are more tricky to space than others. In your case c and v behave almost as a word break. Maybe this is what you intended, but in any case you should try to space them as closely as possible. The hole in the o is probably the visual space you should aim at matching for the rest of the kerning. You can only do this by peering your eyes and playing with different possiblities. Slightly different rules apply for logotypes than for words in continuous text, so take great care. Wade Zimmerman's suggestion seems to be along the right lines although I am inclined to agree with him that it is a little on the tight side.

I have in my possession a litle book of 40-odd pages called Detail in Typography published in 1987 by Compugraphic Corporation, Wilmington (Mass.) USA. (I did some work for them many years back, designing some of the Icelandic characters for their fonts.) If you can get hold of a copy it will certainly help you to learn a bit about working with type.

The persons mention previously as to the best of my knowledge are type designers and may or may not have experience actually composing type.

I am really surprised at this remark. How on earth can you design type without having experience composing it? Type design is so very much more than just making individual letters look pretty. Of course all those that I mentioned had experience composing type. I thought everyone in the business knew that.

Eric Gill wrote for example "An Essay on Typography" first published in 1931 by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. An excellent book of which I have a copy.

Edward Johnson was first and foremost a calligrapher and mentor to Gill and others. A supreme expert in making lettering look well on the page.

Jan Tschichold wrote amongst other things "Meisterbuch der Schrift" (Ravensburg 1965) with numerous examples of how to make type work properly.

I quote from Tschichold: "Letter spacing should not be mechanically but satially equal. The letters must be separated by even and adequate white areas."

I personally met Adrian Frutiger some years back at a lecture on letter design and typography. Of course he was extremely well versed in both.

My own experience of lettering and typography began under the stern eye of Andrew Wilson, another student of Edward Johnson. He taught me at Bath Academy (UK) in the 1960's. I also have experience with hand-setting lead type as well as printing it, so I reckon I know pretty much what I'm on about.

Your trick of turning text upside down is a good one. I often do that and/or sometimes use a mirror. :-)

I'll just throw this out there for the OPer. I work at a large advertising agency, and it seems that almost all the art directors say that they were trained to adjust kerning by "three characters at a time". Narrow your focus to only the first three letters and adjust kerning until they look good. Then narrow your focus to the second-third-fourth letters and adjust until they seem to fit together. Continue through the letters this way. Finally take a look at the entire piece as a unit to see if any problem areas jump out at you.

Zerusiek,

In Illustrator, Preferences>Type, change the Tracking setting from the useless default 20 to 1. (Do the same thing in InDesign and any other graphics program you have.) Thereafter, in the document, place your text cursor between two characters you want to kern. Press and hold CtrlAlt (assuming Windows) while you tap the left/right arrow keys. That will adjust the kerning 1 em unit (1/1000 em) per tap.

Your example is not as bad as countless hideous kerning examples seen every day. It's admirable that your "helper" discerned that it could use some careful kerning. On the other hand, since it's just straightforward text, it's also just as possible that your "helper" merely spouted off the one "critique" he could think of to mention. (Many just like to hear themselves say "kerning.") ;-)

A few pointers:

The goal in kerning a logotype, headline, sign, or whatever is to obtain uniform "color" (grayness) across the type. That means that the negative (white) regions between glyphs needs to be made to appear as uniform as possible. This is not a simple matter of geometric area; it's a matter of human perception. It's an art, not a science.

Obviously, some character combinations are more problematic than others. In your example, the most problematic spot is the one you would expect: the visually huge region between the c and v. The cause is obvious; the shape of a c (semicircle) followed by the diagonal of a v simply necessitates more white space if the characters are not going to collide; more than on the opposite side of the v where it is followed by a vertical i.

So it's a balancing act. Think of the glyphs as an arial view of a set of islands. The "bay" formed between the c and v loosely "spills" out into the surrounding "ocean." The "cove" between the v and i is much more restrictive; it tightly "wedges" the "ship" (the eye) that sails into it.

The whole point of this (now rather commonplace) text treatment wherein two words set in two weights of the same typeface are joined without a wordspace is for the typeface weight alone to be what serves as the differentiator between the two words (or word fragments). If the glyphs at that weight-change location have a too-loose kern, then the entire "cleverness" of this treatment is lost; it starts looking more like a mistake than intentional and artful design intent.

(That's another basic concept of design: Contrast is everything. It's what gives a design interest. Bold contrast is confident. Weak-kneed contrast is wimpy, uncertain. Wimpy contrast is often perceived as error.)

So what does one do?

This particular design could serve as a classic case-in-point example of situations where custom glyph modification may actually be appropriate. (Which is the only reason I'm spending any time in this thread. Those with short attention spans should probably just move on.)

Software makes things too easy. Designers with near zero typographical discernment love to either assume that "text spacing is built-in by some computer scientist, so it must be 'right'" and never even think about such things as kerning. Or they jump straight to the opposite extreme and perform all kinds of hideous adulteration on glyph shapes, thinking that's what makes a "logo" unique--"I'll just give a couple of the characters some kind of 'clever' custom shape, and then I'll have a 'logo.'"

There are several approaches that should be explored in your c-followed-by-v-followed-by-i example.

Your intent in this example is to make sec and visor suggest a seamless "new word" while still making obvious the conjunction of the two source words. First, understand: In addition to the basic glyph shapes issue described above, you have other competing principles at play here. As a general rule of "norm", the lighter the type weight, the greater the character spacing. The bolder the type weight, the tighter the spacing. But that principle strives against your wanting uniform spacing color, and the problem of the too-welcoming cove between the c and v.

It's just such situations that may legitimately and appropriately call for a ligature (a new glyph judicioiusly and elegantly made from the joining of two adjacent glyphs. An artful union of the c and v as a ligature would be one approach to correcting the color problem and might also allow tighter tracking overall. (Some careful experimentation is called for.)

Another approach worth exploring would be [again--artful and judicious] modification of the c glyph by truncating its top end to allow tighter positioning against the v without collision.

Such considerations are among those which give rise to subtle and purposeful glyph manipulations in quality logotype design--not oddball willy-nilly distortion-for-distortion's-sake in an amateurish attempt to make something look "different" or "clever."

Seems an appropriate time to mention once again an event worthy of much celebration: Fontographer (now owned by FontLab) has just been updated for current OSes and font formats. Wouldn't it be great to be able to provide your client (and charge accordingly for) a customized font that contained his logo as a single glyph embeded in the font family on which it is based?

JET