I have made a logo in Illustrator and now I want to deliver it to our client. But I also want to send him a little logo guide and for that, I want to specify the tracking of the letters. A “-25” is in the input field of tracking. I found out that the tracking unit is the Quad (Geviert in Germany, I hope that’s equal).
What should I write in the Logo guide so that every designer will know how to adjust the tracking if he’ll reconstruct the logo? Does it depend on the font size?
How do you specify it universally?
Answer
You don’t.
Logos shouldn’t be reconstructed. Your file should be completely sufficient to display the logo anywhere. That means that, in a vector format logo file as you send it to your customer, text is converted to shapes / outlines. You can do this in Illustrator with Type > Create Outlines or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+O.
Including text in a delivery file as a text object creates all kinds of headaches: any user opening the file lacking the exact same font file will have the font replaced, and they may not even be aware that has happened.
In the case that you would want to write a style guide that includes the negative tracking of a piece of text, ‘-25’ is sufficient: tracking is expressed in a unit* which is relative to the font size. BE sure to specify the typeface and font to be used, as a certain negative tracking may look good with one typeface or font but not with another.
* The unit I was taught this is expressed in is thousands of an em, but that may very well be known under the names you listed.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : daniel , Answer Author : Vincent
