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Typography is an art form that truly amazes and inspires me. Unfortunately, with the advent of computers and libraries of fonts, quality typography is very rare these days. People type, stick with the standards and let it ride.

Great typography, however, is so, so, so, much more. When I work with type, which isn’t very often these days, it’s about spacing, as much as the actual font itself. The leading (space between the lines) and kerning (the space between the letters) are so overlooked these days that it really pisses me off.

Especially the kerning. I love kerning. I am obsessed. And, I drive my wife nutty when I point out great kerning on TV adverts.

Two of my favourites at the moment, for pure typographical simplicity are ITV and Waitrose.

Take the ITV 1 logo. The clarity of the characters (especially for use on screen), the simplicity of the letter styling and the angled edges between the T and the V - the way they just sit together.

The same with the Waitrose logo that stands out a mile on their new TV advert. Such clarity.

And here is where the difference really stands out for the actual Waitrose logo when you compare it to their website.

I am not keen on the drop shadow in the header panel and would argue that it is even necessary. Then when you see their use of the name in the header panel (granted it is in body copy) you can really see how bad it can look when you look at the spacing between the ‘W’ and the ‘a’ in Waitrose. If it was standard text dependent on browser rendering, I would let it go, but this is an image.

That said, these two brands really stick out for me at the moment as great examples of kerning in typography and you can see the amount of thought and effort that has gone into making the difference. Perhaps you have some favourites?

ps. I have just had to go and tidy the logo on our website, which hadn’t been tweaked after being translated into a logo for the web. This is a common problem generally caused by pixelation. And that, is another problem altogether.