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You may not know this but, as well as providing high quality, eco-friendly online printing services, we have a rather brilliant team of in-house designers who are also based at A Local Printer’s HQ.Because we offer online printing services it makes sense for us to have talented designers on hand to deal with all manner of artwork-related issues. Our design team shine their creative prowess over everything: from ‘tidying designs’ – tweaking or converting our clients’ files, to create print-ready artwork – right through to the provision of a fully bespoke creative service.
So, instead of focussing on our online printing services, this blog article is aimed at helping you understand and decipher ‘designer-speak’ – making sense of the terminology that you might encounter when dealing in the realms of graphic design, artwork and printing.
A brief guide to design and print terminology
As providers of a range of online printing services, not to mention design assistance, these are the terms you are most likely to come across when you embark on a creative project:
- Resolution – the measure of the density of pixels that make up the image or graphic, which indicates the quantity of detail that it holds thus reflected in the quality and crispness of the image when printed (measured in DPI, dots per inch).
- Body text – main portion of book or leaflet – excluding front and back pages.
- EPS – Encapsulated PostScript, used for sending/exporting files for print.
- JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group, used to exchange digital artwork/imagery.
- Proof – early copy of to-be-printed material, as a means of checking for typos and positional errors.
- PDF – Portable Document Format, used to reliably convert documents, to send to providers of online printing services, ready for print.
- Pantone – branded colour-matching system used by many designers to identify specific colours.
- Pixel – shorthand term for picture element, or the smallest dot on a computer monitor.
- CMYK – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (Black) – also known as four colour process.
- RGB – Red, Green, Blue – the three components of visible light in computer screens which combine to create all the colours of the spectrum.
- Bleed – where a printed image/background ultimately extends to the edge of the finished page, the ‘bleed’ on the artwork must exceed the margin for when it is later trimmed to size (we recommend a 3mm bleed).
- Crop marks – lines drawn to indicate where proper cropping should take place.
- Font – in typography, a set of characters in a typeface.
- Lineart – any illustration that contains no tone or tint, such as pen and ink drawings.
Our in-house design service
As providers of quality online printing services, we urge our customers not to skimp on design, so if it still seems too much like hard work – and we don’t blame you! – then check out our great value and transparent fixed-price design service.
Design experts and eco-friendly online printing services – what more could you want?
With a broad range of products and services to suit all budgets and projects, A Local Printer offer online printing services for those seeking a high quality and environmentally- responsible print job.
If you require any advice, or want to find out more about our design packages or the range of online printing services we provide, please give one of our friendly team a call on 01903 742003 or Contact Us.
