BRANDING
Icon: Marks without type used to identify a corporation, agency, or institution; they can be legally protected. Some advantages of symbols are that they can create a unique, simple gestalt and relay a quick message. The disadvantages are that they can sometimes be costly to promote and they may be confused with other symbols.
Lettermarks: Letters that form a name in type; used to identify a company, often to shorten the length of a name or make it more pronounceable. These are helpful when trying to abbreviate names to make them more readable, but they can be costly to promote and can be heavy visual competition.
Logos: Word or words in type that identify a company, brand, project, or group. Logos make excellent identity devices but they must be carefully researched to insure that they are cross-culturally effective, understandable, and inoffensive. Ideally, they are one word, the shorter the better. Company logos can incorporate the icon for the company.
Trademark: the term used when the logo or logotype represents a product, not a service. This is shown by the small TM next to the mark.
CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and K for Black. Colors used in four-process printing.
Duotone: a process of giving a black photograph a two-color look.
Digital Printing: plateless printing through electronic prepress. The process is very effective for on-demand four-color printing.
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript File): an image file format that allows PostScript information to be transferred between computer systems. EPS files are limited in the way they can be manipulated. The image can be scaled in both black-and-white and color.
Kerning: in typography, kerning is the decreasing or increasing of the space between individual letters in copy.
Lamination: a process in which heat is used to apply a plastic film to be printed sheet of paper. This coating makes the sheet more durable and colors appear more vividly. This is recommended for posters or pieces that will be used over and over to increase their durability.
Leading: in typeset, it is the space between lines of text.
Opacity: the opposite of transparency or translucency. It is the quality of paper to hide show-through so that you don’t see the images on the other side of the sheet.
Resolution: the measurement, in dots per inch (dpi), of paper or film output. The more dots per inch, the better the resolution and the sharper the output. For internet purposes 72dpi is the standard size. For printing purposes a much higher dpi with a minimum of 300 dpi is required for high quality prints.
RGB: “Red, Green, and Blue,” the main colors utilized by video/computer monitors. These are additive colors because when they are combined in their full values, white is the result. RGB is the common color setting for internet and other display graphics.
Saddle Stitched: the wire binding method of stitching a booklet. The booklet/publication literally straddles a wire like a saddle and is stapled to hold it together. This is the opposite of perfect bound, where the pages are glued into the booklet and there is a spine.
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format): the method for exchanging scanned images between applications.
WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzie-wig”): means “What you see is what you get.” This applies to images on a computer monitor. Basically, what the screen shows is that the printer will output.
ONLINE
Analytics: the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Google analytics is a popular free tool. Most web hosting companies also provide some type of metrics information that is included with their hosting packages.
Blog: a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
BTS (Bits Per Second): the measure of the rate of data transmission. The measure refers to the capacity of a network.
Browser: a program that lets users view hypermedia documents on the Internet. Current web browsers include Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.
Domain Name: Your domain name is another name for you url. It is your websites address. Domain names often end in .com or .edu or .gov. It is typically $35 per year to register your domain name.
Facebook: a social networking website that is open to anyone 13 years of age or older. Facebook users can create and customize their own profiles with photos, videos, and information about themselves. Friends can browse the profiles of other friends and write messages on their pages.
FTP (Filter Transfer Protocol): the Internet service used to transfer a copy of a file from one computer to another.
Home Page: a page of information accessible through the Worldwide Web. The page can contain a mixture of graphics and text, and can include embedded references to other pages. Your home page is the first page a viewer sees when visiting your website.
Host: a synonym for user’s computer. Each computer is connected to the Internet and is classified as a host or a router.
Search Engine: a term applied to automated search services. The term refers to computer programs that such services use to scan the Internet. Google Search is among the most popular and has about 80% of all search traffic.
Twitter: a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): a short character string used by browsers to identify a particular page of information on the Internet. For example: www.savvycatsdesign.com is the url to find our website on the web. It is your web address.