Nearlyfreespeech.net is where this blog, Rififi Nation, is hosted. It’s a great web hosting company if you’re looking for one, however the letter spacing for their logo could use some work. They used a version of Trebuchet for the typeface. It’s a simple, clean design, but here’s another case where the letter spacing is just bad. Check it out in the image below.

It doesn’t take much work to do this logo in Illustrator or Photoshop and save it as .gif file. Perhaps it’s just another case of inexperience. Another person who knows little about design doing it themselves. That’s pretty much the case these days. It’s a shame too. Good letter-spacing is an art. I wonder if all those programs that give you ready made templates so you don’t have to hire a designer have any control for letter spacing. I’d guess not. Honest, just because someone knows how to code software doesn’t make them a designer.

It doesn’t take much to make something look right. Take a look at this logo for Technorati. I’m not looking at the choice of typeface, the color, or the logo design itself. You either find that it works or not. I’m just looking at the letter spacing. The visual space between each letter in this case. The letter spacing is pretty crappy. It doesn’t take much to fix. Squint at it and look for too much or too little white space or dark space. Adjust to taste. I mean this is their company logo. I think some effort should go into company identity and their marks.

Just look at the ‘Te’ letter combination in my note above, in the word Technorati. It’s totally different letter spacing compared to the rest of the word. I set this in Photoshop and left it as the program spit it out. Or look at the ‘Ty’ combination in the title of this very post. A machine is spitting this out and doing the best it can do, today. It needs some help to be done right. The computer and typography have come a long way, but certain special letter combinations will always need some manual help.

I wonder how many blogs and websites are done by designers. It seems that anyone with a computer and a keyboard can ‘design’ a web page these days. Something that a computer can’t do, well not yet with total accuracy, is correctly letter space. Now it is pretty evident that in text like this blog text the letter spacing is usually pretty good. What generally needs more help are logos, titles, & product names. Actually, programs like Adobe’s Illustrator, Indesign, or Photoshop can give surprisingly good results right out of the can. What they still have trouble with are the problem letter combinations like Ty or Tr to show two. Read the rest of this entry »