10 Design Terms that will Impress Your Creative Team
Imagine you're a public relations professional who is in the process of rebranding a client’s company. Since you have no experience with design, you've solicited the help from one of your firm’s best designers for a logo refresh. After submitting a request, you receive an email from the designer:
Hello!
I made a draft for the designs you asked for; I used the sans serif font you requested for the logotype, and made a vectored image of the brand mark so I could work with it more easily. Let me know what you think! The tracking on the font was pretty close, so I had to do a lot of kerning.
Also, could I get the CMYK code for the brand colors? I need them in order to finish the designs.
Thanks!
Confused? Don’t have a clue of what your designer is asking of you? Too embarrassed to ask for clarification? Fear not, after reading this blog, you can step into your next design consultation with a little more confidence by knowing these ten commonly used design terms.
Typography
Typography deals with the visual aspect of a word. It is how a word is visually presented, including books, billboards, magazines, and logos that include the brand name. This term umbrellas everything from your local newspaper to graffiti, styles and fonts can be changed to help convey desired effects.
Serif vs. Sans Serif
Serifs refer to the small strokes that cap off the ends of larger strokes on letters in particular fonts. Popular examples of Serif fonts are Times New Roman and Playfair Display. “Sans” is the latin word for “without”, so sans serif fonts are the fonts without serifs, like Arial and Open Sans. While serif fonts give off a more elegant and classical style, sans serifs are considered a more modern and sleek alternative.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy is a classic design term that refers to the visual appearance of text or design elements that conveys importance by using size, weight, or placement. A common example of hierarchy is in the blog you’re reading right now, where the title of this section is sitting above the paragraph, bolded, and a larger font.
Tracking and Kerning
These terms refer to the space between characters on a line of text. While tracking refers to the adjustment of space in between words, kerning is the adjustment of space between letters of a word. Kerning is especially useful in the design world when creating titles and logos because not every font will automatically type letters of a word with a pleasing amount of space between letters.
Lorem Ipsum
“Lorem Ipsum” are the first two words to a long string of Latin gibberish that serves as a placeholder for large sections of text. This is often used when creating a larger work of text to make sure the completed document design looks pleasing with text before it is entered.
Logo Type and Brand Mark
Both of these terms refer to the branding of a company, but in different ways. While a Logo Type refers to the company’s name typed out in a distinct brand lettering style (a great example of this is CocaCola), a brand mark is the icon that is recognizable as a company without using any words (an example of this is Pepsi’s red, white, and blue circular mark).
Style Guide
Style guides are extremely helpful in the work of a designer because it gives them a reference for how the design a client wants can fit into the rest of the client’s brand aesthetic. Style guides can be mood boards, a color palette, an example of their previous content or design work, or even other designs that they want to implement into their brand. It helps the designer get a better idea of what the client actually wants the design to emulate. Whenever asking a designer for any sort of work, more than likely they will request some sort of style guide with your request.
RGB and CMYK
When working with colored designs, there are three main ways of making sure that colors stay consistent throughout design platforms and documents. The first is RGB, which stands for Red, Green, Blue. This is an additive way of making a color, in that red, green. and blue are added in various ways to make a color code, and ultimately make white when the highest amount of each is added. The amount of each color becomes the RGB code. RGB works best in digital art.
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. It is a subtractive way to make colors, in that the highest amount of each color added together makes black. It works similarly to RGB, but colors rendered through CMYK work better when making physical prints of designs.
Vector
Vector (or Vectored) is a design term that comes from Adobe Illustrator, where all of the graphics are visuals made from mathematical formulas. This ensures that the image can be easily adjusted, made perfect, or enlarged without losing any quality.
White Space
White space refers to the negative space in a design. Even though it’s called “White Space”, it can be any color. White space can serve as a guide through the design and help emphasize what the most important parts of it are. Though known as the “blank” part of the design, white space used skillfully can take a design to the next level. A great example of this is stunning Google’s landing page.
Communication is key when it comes to making the perfect design. Hopefully, these terms will help you communicate exactly what you want from your designer (and impress them with your vocabulary while doing so)!
About Jesse:
Jesse Schmitt is a sophomore studying Advertising and Public Relations with an emphasis in Advertising, and a minor in Studio Art. This is Jesse’s first semester as a Design Associate at GrandPR. After graduation, Jesse’s goal is to become a Creative Director in either the Product Design or Product Sustainability Industry. When she isn’t busy with GrandPR or PRSSA responsibilities, you can find her at a climbing gym, doodling, or enjoying a pour over at a local coffee shop.