How to Speak Artist

[noblerab]

A quickie reference guide for better communication with those funky creative types. Feel free to add your own or ask questions :).



Bleed

Printing or art that goes all the way to the edge of the paper, seeming to run off of the sheet. Printers create bleeds by printing on sheets larger than the trim size, then cutting away the edges.



Layout

A rendition that shows the placement of all the elements, images, thumbnails etc., of a final printed piece.



CMYK

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents.



RGB

Red, Green and Blue. These are the primary colors of light, which computers use to display images on your screen.



DPI

Dots Per Inch



DPI only refers to the printer. Every pixel output is made up of different coloured inks (usually 4-6 colours, although many printers use more now). Because of the small number of colours, the printer needs to be able to mix these inks to make up all the colours of the image. So each pixel of the image is created by a series of tiny dots. Generally, the higher the DPI, the better the tonality of the image, colours should look better and blends between colours should be smoother.

(Think old comic book pages or Roy Lichtenstein.)



PMS

Pantone Color Matching System.



Ppi

Pixels per inch.



This will affect the print size of your photo and will affect the quality of the output. The way that it will affect the quality of the output is that if there are too few pixels per inch, then the pixels will be very large and you will get a very pixelated image



Raster

Image composed of pixels. And can be distorted with enlargement.



Vector

Image composed of paths that won’t distort with enlargement.



Callout

A selection of type (word or phrase) that is set in larger or bolder type from the body-copy font for emphasis.



Element

One of the distinguishable components of a layout: headline, subhead, body copy, illustration, logo, border, etc.



Gutter

The space between two facing pages



Header

One or more lines of text appearing at the top of every page.



Margins

The area from the edge of the paper to the boundary of the layout area of the page.



Orphan Line

A single line of a paragraph at the top of a page or column.



Ragged

The uneven alignment of text lines.



Flush

The even alignment of text lines.



Creative Commons

creativecommons.org for fair/commercial use concerning creative content



No thank you.

An archaic phrase that is commonly mistranslated as an invitation for spam or abusive messages.

[noblerab]

Reply to @madmoo: No problem! 😃

[lparziale]

Nice article! As a layout designer, this will come in handy to my Buyers - I will be referencing this post in the future, thank you for taking the time to add it! =D>

[Guest tn5rr2012]

Great post and I learned something new at 5:50am! Good luck

[boslass]

My gosh- I’m an arty type and I had barely an idea of what most of those meant! I need to get a note-pad, ahahah!