Graphic Design - Glossary #1

I thought I would put together a quick glossary of some of the terms and words I tend to use when talking to a client about their designs or artwork.

Colour settings:

CMYK
stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow Key (black) also known as process colour / four colour process this is the standard colour preset for any document going to print.

RGB
stands for Red Green Blue, this is the standard colour preset for any screen.

Hue
one of the 3 primary attribute to colour, this a variety of colour such as red, yellow, blue or green.

Saturation
this is the intensity of hue,

HSB
Hue, Saturation and Brightness

HLS
Hue, Lightness and Saturation

Grayscale
refers to the image being in black and white

Gradient
A function in most design software that allows you to fill a space with a smooth transition of colours.

Opacity
The range of colour or tonal value, make a colour or image opaque (100%) or transparent (0%)

PPI 
Pixels per inch, how the resolution of a computer screen in maesured.

Vector Graphic
these are graphics that have been drawn in a software such as Adobe Illustrator and allows the designer to change the size of the vector without any loss in quality.

Print:

DPI
Dots per Inch, this measures the sharpness of an image standard resolution for a printed document is 300 dpi and for a screen it is 72 dpi

Pixalated
term used when an image is too blurry and the pixels can be seen

Bleed
All documents that are sent to print should include a bleed, this allows the design/ image / colour to go all the way to the edge.  normal bleed is about 5mm

Header
the text that appears at the top of the page

Headline
Large text that illustrates the opening statement, used in layouts

Body Text
this is the main bulk of the text that is included within a design/layout

Alignment
this is the adjustment of any text or images on the page, i.e left, right, centred

Double Page Spread
Design of a layout that goes across 2 pages.

Dummy
A mock up of the final design

Type:

Typeface
a typeface consists of a series of fonts and a full range of characters, letters, punctuation and marks.

Font
A complete combination of characters that has been created in a specific style, size and type.

Typography
the name given to the art of arranging type so that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Sans Serif
A style of typeface that doesn't have 'feet' i.e Helvetica, Arial

Serif
Refers to a typeface that has 'feet' i.e Times New Roman,

Lowercase
refers to a smaller form or non-capitol letter

Uppercase
Capitol letter

Italic
the style of letters that slant to the right and is often used to emphasis a piece of text

Oblique
A roman typeface that often slants to the right, not to be confused with italics.

Pica
Measurement in which type is measured, normally used for typewriters.

Kerning
The space between individual letters in a word

Leading
This is the space between each sentence in a paragraph

Rivers
refers to the white gaps that appear between the words that have been justified on a page.


File Formats:

.jpeg (jpg) (Joint photographic element group)
standard image file

.pdf (Portable Document Format)
this format is opened within adobe acrobat and can contain several pages.

.png  (Portable network graphics)
this file format is normally used for web images, it displays images without a jagged edge.

.tiff (Tagged image file format)
commonly used on files with a high colour depths

.ai
 Illustrator file

.indd
Indesign File

.psd
Photoshop file

.gif (Graphics interchange format)
displays 256 colours for each frame of an animation

Zip files (Zone information protocol)
this a method of compressing larger files so that they can be transferred or stored easier