AC Vent

Having covered color profiles and website lingo, I will now move on to the wonderful world of print. If you’ve ever had to deal with getting something professionally printed, and are not yourself a printer or designer, you’ve probably been befuddled by terms like DPI, and possibly worried about mention of bleeds and stocks and crops. Not to worry; taking something to print is, usually, a painless and bloodless process if you’re properly prepared. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time on Decoding Design, I decoded the basic terminology regarding color profiles. This time, I’m going to decode the world of building a website. This is a conversation I have to have fairly often with new clients, so I developed a way to explain it in non-programming terms.

Your website is basically your home on the web, right? So let’s go with that metaphor. There are 5 main components and terms you’ve probably heard regarding having a home on the web: hosting, URL, website, FTP, and mail server.

Hosting

Hosting is basically the house or apartment. When you buy a hosting account, you are buying space on a server somewhere to store all of the stuff that will make up your website. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever had an in-depth conversation with a designer, you’ve probably been bombarded by letter combinations like CMYK, RGB, DPI, and odd terms like bleeds and spot colors. We designers throw these terms around all the time, maybe without realizing that not everyone lives and breathes these things like we do.

I’m going to start with decoding just a few basics in this article, namely the acronyms pertaining to color profiles. They are: CMYK, RGB, and PMS.
Read the rest of this entry »

Starting this month, I’m going to be doing a series of articles here on the AC Vent that aims to help clients and prospective clients understand a little more about the world of design. Design is a skilled trade, so there is a lot of technical know-how and industry-specific lingo that we designers use without a second thought, but which people outside of the design industry may be confused about. This series will hopefully help to bridge that gap and help make sure everyone is on the same page.

It’s going to be called Decoding Design, so whenever you see a blog post with that in the title, that’s what’s going on! The first article in the series will be coming up this week, so check back in a few days.

Here are the parts of the series so far:
Decoding Design: Color Lingo
Decoding Design: Web Lingo
Decoding Design: Print Lingo