Kerning
Nudging the space between two specific letters so pairs like 'AV' or 'To' stop looking gappy or crashed together.
See it
What it is
Kerning adjusts the space between one specific pair of letters. Certain shapes leave holes when they sit at their default widths: 'AV', 'To', 'Ye', 'LT', 'P.', 'r.'. The type designer ships fixes for hundreds of these pairs inside the font (the kern table, or GPOS data), and the browser applies them for you via font-kerning.
Hand kerning is a display-size job: wordmarks, logotypes, big headlines, anything set once and stared at forever. Set the type huge, fix the pairs so the white areas between letters feel equal rather than measure equal, then check it small. Squinting, blurring, or flipping the word upside down kills your reading reflex and shows the spacing rhythm honestly. In body copy, leave it alone: the font is better at this than you are at 16px.
Two traps. Kerning is per pair, tracking is the whole run, and most people saying 'the kerning is off' mean tracking. And kern data is fragile: aggressive font subsetting, faux bold, and some icon or webfont pipelines drop it, which is how you end up with 'keming', the joke spelling of what happens when 'rn' collapses into 'm'.
Ask AI for it
Kern this wordmark by hand. Deliver it as editable SVG, or as individually wrapped glyphs I can move, so each pair can be adjusted on its own. Set it at 200px or larger, start from the font's built-in kerning (font-kerning: normal), then shift each glyph's x-position independently until the optical white space between every pair looks equal, rather than measuring equal. Do not apply global letter-spacing, and do not cap the adjustments at some arbitrary maximum: a bad pair needs whatever it needs. Pay attention to diagonal-to-vertical pairs (AV, AW, VA), cap-to-round pairs (To, Yo, Pa), and any letter next to a period or comma. Return before-and-after specimens at 200px and at 24px, plus a blurred version to check the rhythm.