After all, we are the experts, and we don’t expect you to be as well, otherwise you wouldn’t have needed to hire us! Sometimes though, it can help if you understand what we are doing on at least a basic level. So we have compiled five of the most useful design terms that will help you get by.

CTA

“Call to action” or CTA is used to describe part of the design which directly asks your customer to do something. Usually on websites this is a button, or on a print design it might be “call us now!”.

Bleed

Bleed is a print term and refers to part of the artwork which extends past the trim line, allowing your design to run to the edge of the finished page. By using bleed we make sure that your print items look seamless and don’t have any white flashes along the edges.

Vector

A vector is an image file, which is made up of points and lines, rather than lots of individual pixels. Importantly, this means that you can scale a vector file infinitely, and it won’t lose any quality or ‘pixelate’. If we need your logo for anything, we will probably ask for it as a ‘vector’ format, and usually they are identified by file endings such as “eps”, “ai” or “svg”.

Widow

No, it’s not a kind of creative spider! A widow is a typographical term when the last word of a paragraph is alone on its own line. We designers really don’t like widows!

Pantone

Pantone colours are colour codes that stand for a specific shade. Rather than being made out of a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK), they are predefined by a Colour Matching System. This allows for much more accurate colour reproduction.