Graphically used terms.

I felt the need to make a blog post, with useful terms that are widely used in the graphic design area.

Alignment : refers to lining up the top, bottom, sides, or middle of text or graphic elements on a page.

Graphic Design : Images, patterns, layouts, and other graphic devices composed into a coherent, distinctive design intended for printing or display over visual media. A graphic design does not have to be complicated (containing multitude of graphic elements) to be effective. The 'nutrition information' section (found on the labels of practically all packaged foods) that creates a table of data using only horizontal bars of varying thickness is considered one of the best designs of all times. Our life is surrounded with graphic design starting from the breakfast packet we eat in the morning to the logo on the clock that we use to set the alarm for tomorrow.

Gray scale : Gray scale is a range of shades of Gray without apparent colour. The darkest possible shade is black, which is the total absence of transmitted or reflected light. The lightest possible shade is white, the total transmission or reflection of light at all visible wavelength s. Intermediate shades of Gray are represented by equal brightness levels of the three primary colours (red, green and blue) for transmitted light, or equal amounts of the three primary pigments (cyan, magenta and yellow) for reflected light.

CMYK : CMYK is a scheme for combining primary pigments. The C stands for cyan (aqua), M stands for magenta (pink), Y for yellow, and K for Key. The key colour in today's printing world is black but it has not always been. During the early days of printing, the colours used for Key have been brown, blue, or black -- whichever was the cheapest ink to acquire at any given time.

RGB : RGB (red, green, and blue) refers to a system for representing the colours to be used on a computer display. Red, green, and blue can be combined in various proportions to obtain any colour in the visible spectrum. Levels of R, G, and B can each range from 0 to 100 percent of full intensity.

Grid : is a series of vertical and horizontal lines that are used to subdivide a page vertically and horizontally into margins, columns, inter-column spaces, lines of type and spaces between blocks of type and images. These subdivisions form the basis of a modular and systematic approach to the layout, particularly for multipage documents, making the design process quicker, and ensuring visual consistency between related pages. The use of the grid makes the work pure and mathematical.

Hue : The property of colors by which they can be perceived as ranging from red through yellow, green, and blue, as determined by the dominant wavelength of the light.

Italic :  designating or pertaining to a style of printing types in which the letters usually slope to the right, patterned upon a compact manuscript hand, and used for emphasis, to separate different kinds of information

Letterpress :  After the Gutenberg press introduced movable type to the process in the 15th century, letterpress was the predominant printing method for 500 years. The creation of huge rotary presses made industrial printing and newspaper production practical.

By the 1950s, xerography and offset printing began to supplant letterpress and by the end of the 20th century, digital printing and related technologies had become the industry standard for many uses. Nevertheless, letterpress is still used for some specialized commercial applications. The old method is also enjoying a resurgence among modern-day enthusiasts who prize the hand-made qualities and historical nature of letterpress print.

Lowercase :  Alphabet of a particular form often different from and smaller than its corresponding capital letter

Multimedia : The use of computers to present text, graphics, video, animation, and sound in an integrated way. Long touted as the future revolution in computing, multimedia applications were, until the mid-90s, uncommon due to the expensive hardware required. With increases in performance and decreases in price, however, multimedia is now commonplace. Nearly all PCs are capable of displaying video, though the resolution available depends on the power of the computer's video adapter and CPU

Negative Space :Negative space is area around the subjects, or areas of interest.

Positive Space:  positive space is best described as the areas in a work of art that are the subjects, or areas of interest.

Ragged : In typography, lines of type that are not justified; that is, they do not align at the right margin. (Also called ragged right).

Raster : Raster is when a work is worked in pixels

Sans Serif : Letters without the serif

Serif : Any of the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter

Small caps : Capital letters that are about the same height as the typefaces' x-height. Some software programs automatically create their own small caps, but true small caps are often only found in expert typefaces.

Type face: A typeface consists of a series of fonts and a full range of characters such as, numbers, letters, marks, and punctuation.

Typography : The art of arranging type—which includes letters, numbers, and symbols—so that it is pleasing to the eye. This includes not only the font that is used but how it is arranged on the page: letter by letter, size, line spacing, etc. 

Upper-case : Also known as capital letters, they are the larger characters in a typeface.

Vector : Vector is a work which is made mathematically not with pixels

X-hight : This is the height of the lower-case letters that do not have ascenders or descenders, such as a, c, e and mm.

Bibliography.

You The Designer | Graphic Design Lifestyle Blog, 2014, Graphic Design ABCs: A Glossary of Basic Design Terms, [web]: <http://www.youthedesigner.com/graphic-design-resources/design-terms/> [Accessed on 10 January 2015]

WebFinance, Inc., 2015, graphic design, [web] available at:< http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/graphic-design.html >  [Accessed on 10 January 2015]

An encyclopaedia britannica company, Serif, 2015 [web] available at: <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/serif>  [Accessed on 10 January 2015]

Quinstreet Enterprise, 2015, What is grid? [web]  available at: <http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/G/grid.html> [Accessed on 9 January 2015]