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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?

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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.

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    Agree completely. Also: designers will not need to know the tracking. If they needed to recreate it secretly, they will simply drop a facsimile of the logo as an image and then rebuild it by eye. For what its worth, when I have to "remake a logo" becauwe someone sent me a crushed jpg, I usually look on their company website for a published PDF and extract a good logo file from that. The only people who will benefit from tracking info are non-designers who don't even knwo what tracking is and you need to focus more on telling them how to place it while maintaining aspect ratio.
    – Yorik
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 16:26
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    Tracking units aren't used consistently though. When I still used both InDesign and Quark this was confusing... Adobe uses 1/1000 em and Quark uses 1/200 em so −25 in InDesign is actually the same as −5 in Quark. (No idea if this is still the case mind, I've used Adobe consistently for a long time now)
    – Cai
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 16:37
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Facebook will not reveal the tracking they used in their logo. They just provide the logo in a 'converted-to-shapes' format, vector and/or raster. And you do not recreate their logo trying to guess the tracking, you just download and use whatever is officially published. Which is pretty much the standard you should also apply.

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You could specify tracking in case the client would like to create more similar letterings (eg. sub brand or service...) In the future.

The unit is expressed as one thousandth part of em (where em is font-size relative and for a 10pt font it's 10pt), so you can specify it as tracking: -25 * em / 1000. Or you can calculate it and say it's -0.4pt.

Adobe mentions 1/1000 em, see the following doc Kerning and tracking

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