GRAPHICS GLOSSARY

Bleeds: Refers to areas that are printed over the dieline (cut edge). Background art should extend or “bleed” over the planned cut edge by 1/8”. An example product would be a business card magnet with a full color background.

CMYK: Stands for “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black,” which are the four process inks used in four-color process.

DPI: Stands for “dots per inch” in some scanners and computer programs. Computers make art with little dots known as pixels. The dpi is the way to set picture resolution. The more dots in an inch, the higher the picture resolution. Images should be made at 300 dpi or higher. Smaller dpi will create an image that is ragged, stair-stepped, grainy or blurry when printed.

EPS: Stands for “Encapsulated Postscript.” In most art programs EPS is a saving option, or at least an exporting option. Line and vector art files should be saved as EPS. People tend to forget to save their Illustrator files as EPS files thinking all Illustrator files are EPS. You actually need to turn EPS “on” in the save menu.

Four-Color Process: A method used to achieve a full range of colors, tints and gradations using only the four process colors of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Typically a full color original photograph, drawing or other artwork is used to generate four separate printing plates, one for each of the process colors. When printed, the resulting image is composed of a myriad of microscopic dots comprised of the four colors. These tiny colored dots have varying sizing and spacing between them so they blend optically to produce (to the eye and brain of the viewer) a good approximation of the original full-color image.

JPEG: Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork and similar material. It does not work well on lettering or line drawings.

Postscript: This is the language that tells a computer and a printing device how to read your artwork. It treats images, including fonts, as collections of geometrical objects rather than as bitmaps. Postscript fonts are called outline fonts because the outline of each character is defined. They are also scalable fonts because their size can be changed with Postscript commands.

Spot Colors: Printing with spot colors uses any number of specific colored inks (rather than just CMYK) to match exactly each individual hue specified by the designer of a piece of artwork. Spot color inks are mixed according to formulas. This method is good for artwork with just a few colors. Otherwise, four-color process should be used.

TIFF: Stands for Tagged Image File Format. The image is bitmapped art which is created out of little dots of color. Tiff files are good formats for scanning images, as long as the resolution is high enough.

Vector Art: This is art created in a vector-based program. Vector art consists of creating paths and points in a program such as Illustrator or Freehand. The program keeps track of the relationships between these points and paths. Vectors are any scalable objects that keep their proportions and quality when sized up or down. They are defined as solid objects. Vector art is great for type because the lines stay crisp at any scale.