Good fonts are available not only in regular but in italic, bold, and other style. There is no need to re-create fake effects on fonts that are only available as regular. If you need a bold font, and you’ve only got your favourite font as a regular version, search for a new font.
Why you should stick to available font styles
Taking a regular font and adding a stroke to it, in the same colour the font has, creates a fake emboldened font. Using a shear effect to a font creates a fake italic effect, and stretching your fonts re-adjusts the relation of the font elements to each other.
You can use such methods to adjust a single letter. You can also use a shear effect to simply create a shear effect. But you should never use these methods to create fake bold or italic fonts.
Fake font styles will not only destroy the details in your font, they will also knock your text out of alignment, x-height, and cap-height. These font parameters are well adjusted when official style variations of them are available, but when applied to regular fonts with a fake method, you only distort the letterforms which will cause your designs to lose its personality.
Can you use fake fonts in logo design?
You should never use fake fonts in body text. In logo design (and even in headlines) it is sometimes worth a shot. But the more letters, words, and text elements you’ve got, the more you should stay away from fake fonts.
As I’ve said before, a shear effect applied to a wordmark can create a result that works – in fact, many logo designs use a shear effect:
But don’t mistake using a shear effect for using an italic font. Never use a shear effect, if you need your wordmark in italics. Instead, leave the regular font you’ve opted for alone and start searching for a better font, that is also available in italics.