design glossary

Ever wondered what your printer was talking about when they asked whether you want to use digital or offset? Ever been confused by why your designer asks for a dieline? Here are some common terms that are commonly thrown around in the world of design and print.

Offset Print
This is 'traditional' print using a press that prints with plates covered in ink. Offset print is the best option to choose if you have a large job to run or if you want to print on different kinds of paper and card stock.

Digital Print
This kind of printing uses a very sophisticated laser-type printer which utilises toners the same way as your office printer does. You can get some stunning results from digital print for very reasonable prices. This is a good option to use if you have a small print run and a tight budget.

CMYK / 4 Colour / Process Colour
These terms all mean the same thing. A 'full colour' job on a standard press creates all of its colour spectrum out of varying densities of 4 inks: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (which has 'K' as it's letter). You can get pretty good colour this way, but you are often unable to achieve really vivid or deep colours like tangerine, purple or lime green or unusual finishes like silver or gold. This is where you might want to use....

Spot Colours / PMS Colours / Pantone Colours / Specials
These are specially mixed colours that can be selected out of a swatch book and used for offset print. Often these colours can't be achieved using CMYK, or if you only want to print a job which has 1 or 2 colours using these can be more cost effective. Often companies will chose to have their logo created in PMS and CMYK so that they have options over how it is printed depending on where it is being used.
You cannot use these colours if you choose digital print because a digital printer doesn't have the option of using these special inks.

RGB colour
Stand for Red Green Blue and is the colour spectrum of light. Your monitor creates colour using RGB and therefore files supplied for web-only viewing need to be in RGB format. Because of the difference between RGB and CMYK colour, you don't print with RGB files.

Dieline / keyline / knifeline
This the cutting form that is created to cut out a shape in paper or card. For example if your project requires rounded corners or is a box that folds it will need a dieline.

Bleed and Trims
Any print job that has colour running right up to the edge will need bleed to make sure that any fractional movement during printing will not leave a tiny white gap at the edge of the job. Trims show where the job is cut, leaving the excess bleed as scrap.

Resolution
Resolution is defined by DPI; Dots Per Inch. A monitor shows images at a resolution of 72dpi, whereas printed materials are 300dpi. If you try to print a 72dpi image you will find that it will look very 'pixelated'. This is where all the pixels or 'dots' can be seen because there aren't enough of them per inch to make the image appear smooth.
You can take a 300dpi image and make it 72dpi (whereby it loses detail information) but you cannot take a 72dpi image and make it 300dpi. This is because there just isn't enough information in the image to create a smooth picture.