Glossary of design terms

Alley: the space between columns within a page. Not to be confused with the gutter, which is the combination of the inside margins of two facing pages.

Ascender: in typography, the parts of lowercase letters that rise above the x-height of the font, e.g. b, d, f, h, k, I, and t.

Banner: the title of a periodical, which appears on the cover of the magazine and on the first page of the newsletter. It contains the name of the publication and serial information -- date, volume, number.

Baseline: in typography, the imaginary horizontal line upon which the main body of the letters sits. Rounded letters actually dip slightly below the baseline to give optical balance.

Bit-mapped (mode): the Paint graphics mode describes an image made of pixels where the pixel is either on (black) or off (white).

Black (font): a font that has more weight than the bold version of a typeface.

Bleed: an element that extends to the edge of the page. To print a bleed, the publication is printed on oversized paper which is trimmed.

Body type: roman -- normal, plain, or book -- type used for long passages of text, such a stories in a newsletter, magazine, or chapters in a book. Generally sized from 9 point to 14 point.

Callout: an explanatory label for an illustration, often drawn with a leader line pointing to a part of the illustration.

Cap height: in typography, the distance from the baseline to the top of the capital letters.

Caption: an identification (title) for an illustration, usually a brief phrase. The caption should also support the other content.

Clip art: ready-made artwork sold or distributed for clipping and pasting into publications. Available in hard-copy books, and in electronic form, as files on disk.

Color separation: the process of creating separate negatives and plates for each color of ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) that will be used in the publication.

Descender: in typography, the part of the letterform that dips below the baseline; usually refers to lowercase letters and some punctuation, but some typefaces have uppercase letters with descenders.

Display type: large and/or decorative type used for headlines and as graphic elements in display pieces. Common sizes are 14, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, 60, and 72 point.

Expanded (font): a font in which the set widths of the characters are wider than in the standard typeface. (Note: not the intercharacter space -- that is accomplished through letterspacing -- but the characters themselves).

Extended type: typefaces that are wide horizontally -- Hellenic, Latin Wide, Egyptian Expanded, Microgramma Extended, etc.

Feather: to insert small amounts of additional leading between lines, paragraphs, and before and after headings in order to equalize the baselines of columns on a page.

Font: a set of characters in a specific typeface, at a specific point size, and in a specific style. "12-point Times Bold" is a font -- the typeface Times, at 12-point size, in the bold style. Hence "12-point Times Italic" and "10-point Times Bold" are separate fonts.

Greeked text: in page-assembly programs, text that appears as gray bars approximating the lines of type rather than actual characters. This speeds up the amount of time it takes to draw images on the screen.

Gray-scale image: a "deep" bitmap that records with each dot its gray-scale level. The impression of greenness is a function of the size of the dot; a group of large dots looks dark and a group of small dots looks light.

Gutter: In double-sided documents, the combination of the inside margins of facing pages; the gutter should be wide enough to accommodate binding.

Hard hyphen: a non breaking hyphen, used when the two parts of the hyphenated word should not be separated. As opposed to a soft (or normal) hyphen, on which the word-wrapping function of a program will break a line.

Hard return: a return created by the Return or Enter key, as opposed to a word-wrap, or soft return, which will adjust according to the character count and column width.

Head: a line or lines of copy set in a larger face than the body copy.

Image area: the area on a page within which copy is positioned; determined by the margins.

Italic: any slanted or leaning letter designed to complement or be compatible with a companion roman typeface.

Landscape (orientation): a page or layout that is wider than it is tall.

Lap register: used with knockouts, images of different colors are slightly overlapped, to avoid the appearance of a white line between the two inks.

Leader: a line of dots or dashes to lead the eye across the page to separated copy.

Leading: (pronounced "led-ding") the space between lines of type, traditionally measured baseline-to-baseline, in points. Text type is generally set with one or two points of leading; for example, 10-point type with 2 points of leading. This is described as 10/12, read ten on twelve.

Letterforms: in typography, the shapes of the characters.

Ligature: in typography, characters that are bound to each other, such as "oe" and "ae." In professional typefaces, the lowercase "f" is also often set as a ligature in combination with other characters such as "fi" and "fl."

Light (font): a font that is lighter than the roman (normal, plain, or book) version of the typeface.

Line art: black-and-white artwork with no gray areas. Pen-and-ink drawings are line art, and most graphic images produced with desktop publishing graphics programs can be treated as line art. For printing purposes, positive halftones can be handled as line art.

Logotype: a symbol, mark, or identifying name.

Script: connected, flowing letters resembling hand writing with pen or quill. Either slanted or upright. Sometimes with a left-hand slant.

Serif: in a typeface, a counterstroke on letterforms, projecting from the ends of the main strokes. For example, Times or Dutch is a serifed typeface. Some typefaces have no serifs; these typefaces are called sans serif.

Set width: in typography, the horizontal width of characters. Typefaces vary in the average horizontal set width of each character (for example, Times has a narrow set width), and set widths of individual characters vary in typeset copy depending on the shape of the character and surrounding characters.

Sidebar: in newsletter/magazine layout, a related story or block of information that is set apart from the main body text, usually boxed and/or screened.

Small caps: capital letters set at the x-height of the font.

Solarization: a photographic image in which both blacks and whites appear black, while midtones approach white.

Solid: lines of type with no space between the lines (unleaded).

Spot color separation: for offset printing, separation of solid premixed ink colors (for example, green, brown, light blue, etc.); used when the areas to be colored are not adjacent. Spot color separations can be indicated on the tissue cover of the mechanical, or made with overlays.

Spread: in a double-sided document, the combination of two facing pages, which are designed as a unit. Also, the adjacent inside panels of a brochure when opened.

Standing elements: in page design, elements that repeat exactly from page to page, not only in terms of style, but also in terms of page position and content. The most commonly used standing elements are page headers or footers, with automatic page numbers.

Tombstoning: in multicolumn publications, when two or more headings in the same horizontal position on the page.

Track: in typography, to reduce space uniformly between all characters in a line. As opposed to kerning, which is the variable reduction of space between specific characters.

Type alignment: the distribution of white space in a line of type where the characters at their normal set width do not fill the entire line length exactly. Type maybe aligned left, right, centered, or right-justified.

Typeface: the set of characters created by a type designer, including uppercase and lowercase alphabetical characters, numbers, punctuation, and special characters. A single typeface contains many fonts, at different sizes and styles.

U&lc: abbreviation for upper- and lowercase.

Unit: in typography, divisions of the em space, used for fine-tuning the letterspacing of text type. Different typesetting systems and desktop publishing software use different unit divisions: 8, 16, 32, and 64 are common. One unit is a thin space or a hair space.

Weight: denotes the thickness of a letter stroke, light, extra-light, "regular," medium, demi-bold, bold, extra bold and ultra bold.

White space: in designing publication, the areas where there is no text or graphics -- essentially, the negative space of the page design.

Widow: in a page layout, short last lines of paragraphs -- usually unacceptable when separated from the rest of the paragraph by a column break, and always unacceptable when separated by a page break.

Word wrap: in a word processor or text editor, the automatic dropping of characters to the next line when the right margin is reached.

WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get): an interactive mode of computer processing, in which there is a screen representation of the printed output. WYSIWYG is never entirely accurate, because of the difference in resolution between display screens and printers.

x-height: the height of the lowercase "s." Sometimes referred to as "body height." More generally, the height of the lowercase letters.