Your print-on-demand business can’t survive without graphic design. After all, you need to have good designs to entice customers to buy your products. You should know some basic graphic design terms whether you’re the designer or you hire one. These terms can help you know when a design is good and when it’s time to let a design go.
Anti-aliasing is a technique to make the edges of graphics, fonts, or objects appear smooth by adding more pixels.
CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). This is the color code your images should be in. If you design with RGB colors, they may look duller in real life.
Color theory is the guideline for colors and creating proper visuals. We have an entire blog post breaking down what color theory is and how it can improve your designs.
This is the setup of the text and images on any design.
Cropping an image means cutting out and getting rid of sections of an image you don’t need.
DPI stands for Dots Per Inch and is the number of dots a printer can place per inch. The more dots an image has the better quality of the print. Dots can also be referred to as pixels.
We have a great academy lesson all about DPI and other printig basics!
A hex code is a six-digit number to represent a color. They’re often used in HTML, CSS, and design software. It’s the easiest way to ensure that a team of designers all use the same color.
This is when you adjust the space between two characters (letters) within a text.
The amount of space between two lines of text.
This is a type of digital image. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It’s used for images with a lot of data or pixels and compresses them down to as small as you want.
This is the border of a page or artboard. You don’t want to have any part of your design too close to the margins.
A mockup is when you create a model of what a product will look like with your design on it. That way you can see how a design looks before you or a customer orders it.
Opacity is how solid a color or object looks. The lower the opacity, the more transparent an object or color looks. It’s good for getting different shades of an individual color.
The smallest digital image or graphic that can be seen on a digital device. Essentially everything is made of pixels.
This stands for Pixels Per Inch which is how many pixels are in a digital image.
This is a type of digital image. PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. It’s used for uncompressed images, meaning that the quality of the image doesn’t lower.
The principles of design are standard guidelines to help people of all design skills create a beautiful composition. Like with color theory, we have a blog post dedicated to explaining each principle.
This is the file that contains the design you want to be printed on a product. It has your design, the needed size, placement of the design, the color profile, and the resolution.
Raster graphics are made of pixels and can’t be enlarged without losing quality.
Resolution is how many pixels per inch are in an image. The higher the resolution, the better the quality. Lower resolution makes images blurry and pixelated.
RGB stands for red, green, and blue. This is the color profile that digital images are viewed in, and sometimes the colors don’t translate well outside the digital world.
Scale is the size of one object compared to another. When creating a design it’s important to think about scale and how it can improve your design.
Images other creators have made that can be licensed for your own use. There are free and purchasable versions.
Tracking is how much space is between words.
Typography is the design of text. It can include the design of the letters, the size, arrangement, and more.
Vectors are graphics made of lines, shapes, and curves that can be enlarged without losing quality.
Weight refers to the thickness of a character, like text being bold versus regular.
By learning these basic graphic design terms, you’ll be able to learn more about the art of graphic design. If you design for your product, you’ll save a lot of time and effort because you know common graphic design techniques. If you hire a designer, you’ll save money because you will know what to look for in the designer’s portfolio.
It truly is essential that you know these graphic design terms as a print-on-demand business owner.
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