Designer Speak 101:
If you’ve ever worked with a graphic designer, you’ve probably heard them use words like “vector”, “raster”, “high-resolution”, “negative space”, “visual hierarchy” ... and thought, “What in tarnation are they talking about?” We get it. It’s a lot... and we decided to study these terms for a living!
“Why do I need to know designer lingo, that’s what I pay you for?” Well my friend, that can be summed up in two words. Cost. Reduction. Understanding your designer’s lingo means less miscommunication between you and your designer when working on your project. It’s like going to the doctor and telling them you feel bad, but being unable to identify your symptoms and expecting them to know what is wrong with you. It can be frustrating! Knowing the lingo leads to more productive revisions and less time going in circles trying to get the vision in your head onto your designer’s screen. After all, both parties want the design to be pure perfection! With that said, let’s talk about the most common terms you’re going to hear your designer say to you:
VECTOR:
Vector artwork is a type of artwork that uses the power of math and points to create graphics that can be scaled
infinitely without losing any image quality. Your image will look exactly the same whether it be on a small business card or on the side of your box truck. Perfect quality every time!
RASTER:
You encounter raster artwork everyday without even knowing it! Raster artwork uses pixels to create it’s picture. The pictures you take on your phone are raster files. These have a predetermined maximum size. There are loopholes to change the size of your picture, which your designer knows all about. However, they cant’ work miracles, so they need high-resolution images to work their magic.
HIGH-RESOLUTION:
“I took this picture on my phone, so surely it will work right?” Well, not always. As mentioned, raster images have a predetermined maximum size, so they can only be manipulated so far before the image looks like garbage. When your designer says “high-resolution”, they generally mean an image that is of large pixel dimensions and high DPI (Dots Per Inch). The DPI is what gives the image its quality. HIGH DPI images have more dots in one inch square than a LOW DPI image. Bigger is better right? Ideally, you want your pictures taken with a professional quality camera, not a smart phone. While some smart phones can take pictures of large pixel dimensions, their DPI is low, which makes enlarging the picture nearly impossible without the image becoming pixelated or blurry. If you’re unsure of your images’ quality, your designer will be able to tell you, just send it over!
NEGATIVE SPACE:
Imagine that moment when you pull into your driveway. You turn off the car and the radio, and sit there in complete silence. You’re just there with nothing going on, and it’s magical. Negative space is that special area of your design with absolutely nothing in it. This is what gives your design balance. If everything is crammed and as large as possible, your viewer has no idea where to start and has a harder time digesting what you are wanting them to, which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? Negative space is your design’s happy place.
VISUAL HIERARCHY
EVERYTHING. DOES. NOT. HAVE. TO. BE. AS. BIG. AS. HUMANLY. POSSIBLE. (You can tell we feel very strongly
about this.) If you tell your designer your logo needs to be bigger, and your website, and your phone number, you know what... make it all HUGE because the information is SUPER IMPORTANT, then to your viewer, nothing is important. Visual hierarchy is what tells your viewer what is the most important thing that they should walk away from your design knowing. For those of us who have ever made a recipe from Pinterest, we know that we have 80 years of biography to read before we get to the good stuff, but none of us want to know what Karen’s life was like before she made this life changing recipe. We scroll as fast as we can to get to the thing that looks like a recipe. We are able to identify the break between Karen’s life story and the recipe because the visual hierarchy allows us to detect it. Bold headers, larger fonts, different colored text. All these things help create visual breaks and importance.