Card-catalogue cabinet with open drawers spilling colour swatches and proof sheets onto a table (AI-generated image) — AI-generated image

advertising and design terms

Advertising Terms Glossary: Graphic Design and Branding Terms A to Z

This glossary defines over two hundred advertising terms, graphic design terms and print words in plain language, from above the fold to x-height. Before the A to Z list, a short history of where the vocabulary came from: the composing room, the newspaper, the brand register, the broadcast studio and, most recently, the browser.

Union Creative editorial · published August 18, 2026 · last updated August 18, 2026 · 5 min read

Glossary A to Z

A

A/B testing: Running two versions of an ad, email or page at the same time to see which performs better. Audiences are split at random, and only one element should differ so the result shows what caused the change.
Above the fold: The part of a page visible without scrolling or unfolding. The term comes from broadsheet newspapers, whose top half showed on the newsstand. On screens the fold moves with every device, so it is an approximation.
Accent colour: A colour used sparingly to draw attention to buttons, links, highlights or key figures. It works because it is rare on the page; an accent applied everywhere stops standing out and becomes just another background colour.
Ad copy: The written words of an advertisement, including headline, body text, slogan and call to action. Good copy is usually short, specific and written for one reader, and it is often tested in several versions before launch.
Ad network: A service that collects advertising space from many websites or apps and sells it to advertisers in bulk. It lets a brand reach audiences across thousands of sites without negotiating with each publisher separately.
Additive colour: Colour made by mixing light, as on screens. Red, green and blue light combine to form white, and their absence is black. It is the opposite of subtractive colour, which is used for ink on paper.
Advertorial: A paid advertisement designed to look like editorial content in a newspaper, magazine or website. Most publications and advertising codes, including in Canada, require it to be clearly labelled so readers know it is paid.
Alignment: The placement of text or objects along a common edge or centre line. Left, right, centred and justified alignment each change how a page reads, and consistent alignment is one of the simplest ways to make a layout look organised.
Analogous colours: Colours that sit next to each other on the colour wheel, such as blue, blue-green and green. Schemes built from them feel calm and unified, and they usually need one contrasting accent to keep a design from looking flat.
Anchor text: The visible, clickable words of a hyperlink. Descriptive anchor text such as typography basics tells readers and screen readers where a link goes, while vague text such as click here gives them no information.
Art direction: The visual leadership of an ad, campaign or publication: choosing the look, photography, illustration, type and layout so they serve the idea. The art director usually works alongside a copywriter as a creative team.
Artboard: A defined canvas inside design software, such as one screen size or one print page. Several artboards can sit in one file, which helps designers lay out a phone, tablet and desktop version of the same design side by side.
Ascender: The part of a lowercase letter that rises above the x-height, as in b, d, h, k and l. Long ascenders give a typeface an elegant, open feel, while short ones save vertical space in tight headlines.
Aspect ratio: The proportional relationship between the width and height of an image, screen or frame, written as two numbers such as 16:9 or 4:5. Changing the ratio of a picture always means cropping it or adding empty space.
Asymmetry: A layout in which the two halves are deliberately unequal, balanced by visual weight rather than by mirroring. Asymmetric designs often feel more dynamic than symmetrical ones and were championed by modernist typographers in the 1920s.
Attribution: The process of deciding which ads or channels deserve credit for a sale or sign-up. Last-click attribution credits only the final interaction, while multi-touch models spread credit across every ad a person saw beforehand.
Awareness: How many people in a target audience recognise or recall a brand. Awareness is usually measured with surveys before and after a campaign and is the main goal of many television, outdoor and sponsorship campaigns.

B

Banding: Visible stripes or steps in what should be a smooth gradient. It happens when an image has too few colour levels, often after heavy compression or conversion, and is especially noticeable in skies and dark backgrounds.
Banner ad: A rectangular image or animated advertisement placed on a web page. The first clickable web banner ran in October 1994, and standard sizes such as the 300 by 250 pixel rectangle are still sold today.
Baseline: The invisible line on which most letters sit. Descenders such as the tails of g and p drop below it. Aligning text to a shared baseline grid keeps lines in neighbouring columns level with one another.
Billboard: A large outdoor advertising structure, usually beside a road or on a building. The name comes from bill posting, the practice of pasting printed notices, and modern billboards are increasingly digital screens that rotate several ads.
Bleed: Artwork that extends beyond the final trim edge of a printed piece, usually by about 3 millimetres or one-eighth of an inch. It prevents thin white slivers appearing if the paper is cut slightly off position.
Body copy: The main block of text in an advertisement, below the headline. It explains the offer, gives reasons to believe it and leads toward the call to action. Many modern ads use very little body copy or none at all.
Bounce rate: The share of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page without interacting further. A high bounce rate can signal a mismatch between an ad's promise and the page, though for some pages it is normal.
Brand: The set of ideas, feelings and expectations people associate with a company, product or organisation. The word comes from burning marks onto livestock and goods to show their owner, and a brand still signals where something comes from.
Brand architecture: The way a company organises its brands and sub-brands. Some use one master brand on everything, others run separate brands that rarely mention the parent company, and many mix both approaches across different product lines.
Brand equity: The extra value a recognised name adds to a product compared with an unbranded equivalent. It shows up in price, loyalty and willingness to try new products, and it can be lost quickly through scandal or neglect.
Brand guidelines: A document that explains how to use a brand's logo, colours, typefaces, photography and tone of voice. It keeps work consistent when many designers, partners and suppliers produce material for the same organisation.
Brand identity: The visible and audible elements a brand controls: name, logo, colours, type, sound, packaging and voice. Identity is what the company creates; image is what the public actually perceives, and the two do not always match.
Brand voice: The consistent personality a brand uses in writing and speech, such as formal, playful or plain. A clear voice lets customers recognise a brand from a sentence alone, even without seeing its logo or colours.
Brief: A short document that tells a creative team what an ad or campaign must achieve, who it is for, what to say and any limits. A clear brief is often the difference between focused work and expensive guessing.
Broadsheet: The largest common newspaper format, with long vertical pages. Broadsheets gave design the term above the fold, and many papers have since switched to smaller tabloid or compact formats to cut costs and suit commuters.
Bullet: A small dot or symbol placed before items in a list. Bullets help readers scan separate points, but too many bulleted lists can break an argument into fragments that never connect into a clear piece of writing.

C

Call to action: The part of an ad that tells the audience what to do next, such as buy now, sign up or visit a store. Effective calls to action are specific, easy to follow and placed where the eye naturally finishes.
Campaign: A coordinated set of advertisements and activities sharing one idea and goal, run across a set period and often several media. Memorable campaigns can run for years, with new executions refreshing the same central concept.
Cap height: The height of a typeface's capital letters measured from the baseline. Cap height and x-height together shape how large a font appears; two fonts at the same point size can look very different because of them.
Caption: The short text placed beside or beneath an image to explain it. Captions are among the most read words on a page, because readers often look at pictures first and then read what sits directly next to them.
Carousel: A format that shows several images or cards in one ad or post, viewed by swiping or clicking. Social platforms use carousels for product ranges and step-by-step stories, and each card can carry its own link.
Cliché: Originally a French printers' word for a cast metal printing plate that reproduced a page repeatedly. It came to mean any phrase or image used so often that it no longer carries real meaning.
Click-through rate: The percentage of people who click an ad or link after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions. Abbreviated CTR, it became the standard measure for web banners from the mid-1990s onward.
Clickbait: A headline or thumbnail designed mainly to attract clicks by exaggerating or withholding information. It may raise click-through rates briefly, but it tends to disappoint readers and damage trust in the publisher or brand.
CMYK: The four process inks used in most colour printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and key, meaning black. Tiny dots of these inks overlap to create other colours, and some bright screen colours cannot be reproduced with them.
Co-branding: A partnership in which two brands appear together on one product or campaign, such as a limited-edition collaboration. Each brand lends its reputation to the other, so a poor match can harm both names.
Colour wheel: A circular diagram of hues arranged in spectrum order, used to plan colour schemes. Isaac Newton drew an early version in his 1704 book Opticks, and designers still use it to find complementary and analogous colours.
Column inch: A unit of newspaper advertising space one column wide and one inch deep. Advertisers once bought press space by the column inch, which is why many early newspaper ads were narrow and tall.
Complementary colours: Colours opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as blue and orange or red and green. Placed side by side they create strong contrast, which makes them useful for calls to action and attention-grabbing packaging.
Composition: The arrangement of elements within a design or image: where things sit, how large they are and how the eye moves between them. A strong composition guides the viewer to the most important element first.
Contrast: The difference between elements in size, colour, weight, shape or brightness. Contrast creates emphasis and hierarchy, and sufficient contrast between text and background is essential for readability and accessibility.
Contrast ratio: A measure of the brightness difference between text and its background, from 1:1 to 21:1. WCAG guidelines ask for at least 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text to remain readable.
Conversion: The action an advertiser wants someone to take, such as a purchase, sign-up or download. The conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete it, and it is central to judging online campaigns.
Cookie: A small file a website stores in a browser to remember information such as log-ins or settings. Third-party cookies track people across sites for ads, and privacy laws and several browsers now restrict them heavily.
Copywriter: The person who writes the words in advertising, from headlines and slogans to scripts and web copy. Copywriters traditionally work in a pair with an art director, developing the idea together before either writes or designs.
Corporate identity: The visual system an organisation uses everywhere it appears, including logo, colours, typography, signage and stationery. Large corporate identity programmes became common in the 1950s and 1960s, when companies standardised their look worldwide.
CPC: Cost per click: the amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks an ad. It is the usual pricing model for search ads, where advertisers bid against each other for placement on results pages.
CPM: Cost per mille, meaning the price of one thousand impressions. The M is the Roman numeral for a thousand. CPM lets advertisers compare the cost of reaching audiences across very different media and formats.
Creative: As a noun, the finished ads themselves, or the people who make them. Advertisers might ask to review the creative, meaning the visuals and copy, separately from the media plan that decides where those ads appear.
Crop marks: Thin lines printed outside the corners of a page to show where the paper should be trimmed. Also called trim marks, they sit in the bleed area and are cut away along with any extra artwork.

D

Demographics: Measurable characteristics of an audience such as age, gender, income, education and location. Media planners use demographics to choose channels, though behaviour and interests often predict response better than age alone.
Descender: The part of a lowercase letter that drops below the baseline, as in g, j, p, q and y. Leading must leave room for descenders so they do not collide with tall letters on the line below.
Die cut: A printing finish in which a sharp steel shape cuts paper or card into a custom outline or makes a window in it. Die cuts are common on packaging, business cards and pocket folders.
Direct mail: Advertising sent to people's homes or businesses by post, such as letters, catalogues and flyers. It is easy to target and measure, and it remains widely used for charities, retailers and local services.
Display ad: An advertisement made of images, graphics or video placed on websites and apps, as opposed to text-only search ads. In newspapers, display ads were the large illustrated ads, distinct from small classifieds.
Display type: Typefaces or sizes intended for headlines, posters and signs rather than long reading. Display faces can be more decorative or extreme because they are read in short bursts at large sizes.
Dot gain: The tendency of printed dots to spread as ink soaks into paper, making images darker than expected. Uncoated papers and newsprint show more dot gain, so files are often adjusted before printing on them.
DPI: Dots per inch, a measure of how finely a printer places ink. The term is often used loosely for image resolution, which is more accurately measured in pixels per inch, abbreviated PPI.
Drop cap: A large initial letter at the start of a paragraph that drops down across several lines of text. It descends from illuminated manuscripts and still marks the opening of chapters, features and long articles.
Duotone: An image printed or displayed using two colours, usually a dark ink and a lighter one. Duotones add depth to black and white photographs and have become a popular graphic style for posters and websites.

E

Earned media: Publicity a brand gains without paying for it directly, such as news coverage, reviews, word of mouth and shares on social media. It is often contrasted with paid media and with owned channels like a company website.
Em: A unit of measurement equal to the current font size. In 12 point type, one em is 12 points. In CSS, the em unit works the same way and scales with the font size of its element.
Em space: A blank space as wide as one em. It was traditionally used for paragraph indents in metal type, and typographers still prefer a modest indent of about one em to mark a new paragraph.
Embossing: A finish that presses a raised design into paper or card using a pair of matching dies. Debossing does the opposite, pressing the design down. Both add texture to invitations, packaging and premium business cards.
En: A unit equal to half an em. The en dash, a short dash the width of an en, is used for ranges such as 1960–1969 and in some styles to set off phrases within a sentence.
Endorsement: A recommendation of a product by a well-known person, expert or organisation. Advertising codes, including in Canada, require endorsements to reflect honest, current opinions and paid relationships with the brand to be disclosed.
Engagement rate: The share of people who interact with a post or ad by liking, commenting, sharing or clicking, relative to how many saw it. Platforms calculate it differently, so figures are hard to compare between them.
Eye tracking: Research that records where people look on a page or screen and in what order. Studies of web pages helped popularise patterns such as the F-shaped scan of text-heavy pages and informed many layout rules.

F

Favicon: The small icon shown in a browser tab, bookmark list or search result next to a website's name. It is usually a simplified version of a logo, because detail disappears at sizes as small as 16 pixels.
Flat design: A visual style that avoids shadows, textures and three-dimensional effects in favour of simple shapes and solid colours. It became mainstream in interface design around 2013, partly as a reaction against imitation leather and glass.
Flexography: A printing method using flexible relief plates on rotating cylinders, common for packaging, labels, bags and corrugated boxes. It handles plastic films and uneven surfaces that offset lithography cannot print on easily.
Flyer: A single printed sheet advertising an event, service or offer, handed out or posted in public places. Flyers are cheap and quick to produce, which made them central to music scenes and local businesses.
Focal point: The element in a design that the eye reaches first, usually through size, contrast, colour or position. A layout with no clear focal point feels confusing; one with several competing points feels noisy.
Font: Strictly, one size and style of a typeface; in metal type, a complete set of one size cast together. The word comes from the French fonte, meaning a casting. Today it is often used to mean typeface.
Font weight: The thickness of a typeface's strokes, from thin and light through regular to bold and black. On the web, weights are numbered from 100 to 900, with 400 as regular and 700 as bold.
Frequency: The average number of times each person in an audience sees an ad during a campaign. Planners balance frequency against reach, since too few exposures go unnoticed and too many annoy people.

G

Gamut: The range of colours a device or process can reproduce. Screens can show many vivid colours that CMYK printing cannot, so designs headed for print should be checked for out-of-gamut colours early.
Gestalt principles: Psychological rules describing how people group what they see, such as proximity, similarity, continuity and closure. Developed by German psychologists in the early twentieth century, they explain why some layouts feel naturally organised.
Glyph: A single drawn shape within a font, such as a letter, numeral, punctuation mark or ligature. One character can have several glyphs, for example a regular a, a small capital a and an alternative swash a.
Golden ratio: A proportion of about 1.618 to 1, written with the Greek letter phi. It is used in some layouts and type scales, though many popular claims about it in famous logos and buildings are not supported.
Gradient: A smooth transition from one colour to another, either along a straight line or outward from a point. Gradients add depth and movement, but they can show visible steps, called banding, when printed or compressed.
Graphic design: The practice of planning and arranging type, images and colour to communicate a message. Book designer W. A. Dwiggins is usually credited with first using the phrase in 1922 for work then done by printers.
Greyscale: An image made only of shades of grey from black to white, with no hue. Converting a design to greyscale is a quick way to check whether its contrast and hierarchy still work without colour.
Grid: An invisible framework of columns, rows and margins used to place elements consistently. Swiss designers of the 1950s and 1960s made rigorous grids central to modern typography, and web layouts still rely on them.
Guerrilla marketing: Low-cost, unconventional advertising placed in surprising public spots, such as street installations, stunts or stickers. The term was popularised by Jay Conrad Levinson's 1984 book of the same name.
Gutter: The space between columns of text, or the inner margin where two facing pages meet at the binding. A gutter that is too narrow makes columns blur together, while one too wide breaks a spread apart.

H

Halftone: A technique that reproduces photographs in print using dots of varying size. From a distance the dots blend into continuous tones, which made printing photographs in newspapers practical from the late nineteenth century.
Headline: The main line of large type in an ad or article, meant to stop the reader. In print advertising tradition, the headline was considered the most important element, read by far more people than the body copy.
Hero image: The large, prominent image at the top of a web page, landing page or email. It sets the tone immediately, so it should load fast and relate clearly to the page's main message.
Hex code: A six-character code that defines a colour on screens, written with a hash sign, such as #FF0000 for pure red. Pairs of characters give the red, green and blue values in base sixteen.
Hierarchy: The arrangement of elements so readers can tell what matters most, next and least. Designers create hierarchy through size, weight, colour, spacing and position, and a clear hierarchy lets people scan a page quickly.
House style: The set of rules an organisation follows for spelling, grammar, punctuation and formatting. It covers choices such as colour or color, and it keeps writing consistent across many authors and publications.
Hue: The pure identity of a colour, such as red, blue or yellow, separate from how light, dark or intense it is. On a colour wheel, hue is the position around the circle, measured in degrees.

I

Icon: A small, simplified picture representing an action, object or idea, such as a magnifying glass for search. Effective icons are recognisable at small sizes and are usually paired with a text label for clarity.
Imposition: The arrangement of pages on a large printing sheet so that, once folded and trimmed, they appear in the right order. Booklets and magazines depend on correct imposition to avoid pages printing upside down.
Impression: A single display of an ad to one viewer. Impressions count how often an ad was served, not whether anyone noticed it, which is why advertisers also measure viewability and clicks.
Influencer marketing: Paying or partnering with people who have large social media followings to promote products to their audience. In Canada, influencers must clearly disclose material connections with brands under advertising rules and competition law.
Infographic: A visual explanation that combines charts, illustrations, icons and short text to present data or a process. A good infographic makes one point clearly; a crowded one simply decorates numbers.
Italic: A slanted style of type based on handwriting, first cut in Venice around 1500. Italic is mainly used for emphasis and titles, and true italics redraw the letters rather than simply tilting the regular style.

J

Jingle: A short, catchy song written for an advertisement, usually featuring the brand name. The 1926 Wheaties song on American radio is often cited as an early sung commercial, and jingles peaked in mid-century broadcasting.
Justified text: Text aligned evenly to both left and right margins, as in many books and newspapers. Without careful hyphenation, justified text can leave uneven gaps between words, known as rivers, running down the column.

K

Kerning: Adjusting the space between a specific pair of letters, such as A and V, so they look evenly spaced. The word comes from the kern, the part of a metal letter that overhung its body.
Key art: The main image created for a film, game, show or campaign, used across posters, streaming tiles and advertising. It must work at very different sizes, from a billboard down to a tiny thumbnail.
Key visual: The central image or graphic device of a campaign that ties all its executions together. A strong key visual is recognisable even when the headline and format change from poster to social post.
Kicker: A short line of text above a headline that introduces its topic or section, often set smaller or in a different style. Newspapers and magazines use kickers to label series or categories.

L

Landing page: The web page someone reaches after clicking an ad or link. A focused landing page matches the ad's promise and asks for one action, which usually improves conversion compared with sending visitors to a homepage.
Layout: The arrangement of text, images and space on a page or screen. A layout decides what is seen first, how content is grouped and how the reader moves through it, all before a word is read.
Leading: The vertical space between lines of text, measured from baseline to baseline. The term comes from strips of lead that compositors placed between lines of metal type. On the web it is called line-height.
Legibility: How easily individual letters and characters can be told apart. Legibility depends mostly on the typeface's design, while readability depends on how the text is set, including size, spacing and line length.
Letterpress: A relief printing method in which raised type and images are inked and pressed into paper. It dominated printing from Gutenberg's era into the twentieth century and is now prized for its tactile impression.
Ligature: Two or more letters joined into one glyph, such as fi or fl, to avoid awkward collisions. In metal type ligatures were cast as single pieces, and many digital fonts substitute them automatically.
Line length: The width of a line of text, often measured in characters and also called the measure. Around 45 to 75 characters per line is the traditional comfortable range for continuous reading in a single column.
Logo: A graphic mark or stylised name that identifies a company, product or organisation. The word is short for logotype, a printing term for a single piece of type carrying several letters cast together.
Logotype: A logo made entirely from a styled name or word rather than a symbol, also called a wordmark. In metal printing it originally meant one piece of type carrying two or more letters.
Lorem ipsum: Placeholder text used to show a layout before the real copy is written. It is scrambled Latin derived from a work by Cicero written in 45 BCE and became common in printing and later design software.

M

Mascot: A character created to represent a brand, such as an animal, person or object with a name and personality. Mascots make brands recognisable to children and adults alike and can last for many decades.
Masthead: The title of a newspaper or magazine as displayed across the top of the front page or cover. In many publications the term also refers to the box listing the editors and publishing details.
Media buying: Purchasing advertising space or time in media such as television, radio, print, outdoor and digital, at the best available price. Media buyers negotiate rates and placements according to a plan built around the target audience.
Media kit: A package a publisher or platform provides to advertisers, describing its audience, reach, ad formats, prices and deadlines. Media kits help advertisers decide whether a publication suits their campaign.
Media plan: A document that sets out where, when and how often a campaign's ads will run, and how the budget is divided. It balances reach, frequency and cost against the audience the brand wants to reach.
Mockup: A realistic preview showing how a design will look in use, such as a logo on a shopfront or an app on a phone. Mockups help people judge a design before money is spent on production.
Modular scale: A set of related type sizes created by multiplying a base size by a fixed ratio, such as 1.25. Using one ratio keeps the sizes in proportion and produces a clear, consistent hierarchy.
Monochrome: A design using a single hue in several shades and tints, or strictly only black and white. Monochrome schemes feel unified and calm, and they put more emphasis on shape, texture and type.
Monospace: A typeface in which every character takes the same width, as on a typewriter. Monospaced fonts are used for code and tabular data, where characters need to line up in columns.
Mood board: A collection of images, colours, textures, type and references assembled to set the visual direction of a project. It helps a team agree on a feeling before detailed design work starts.

N

Native advertising: Paid content that matches the form and style of the platform where it appears, such as a sponsored article on a news site. It must be labelled clearly as paid so readers can tell it apart from editorial content.
Negative space: The empty area around and between the subjects of a design. Used deliberately, negative space can create a second image, as when the gap between two letters forms a hidden arrow.

O

Offset lithography: The most common commercial printing method for large runs. Ink is transferred from a metal plate to a rubber blanket and then onto paper, giving sharp results on books, magazines and brochures.
Old-style figures: Numerals that vary in height and sometimes drop below the baseline, like lowercase letters. They blend smoothly into running text, while lining figures, all the same height, suit tables and headings.
Opacity: How solid or see-through an element is, from fully transparent to fully opaque. Designers use reduced opacity for overlays and subtle backgrounds, but text with low opacity often fails contrast requirements.
Orphan: A single word or very short line left alone at the end of a paragraph, or a paragraph's first line stranded at the bottom of a column. Editors and designers rewrite or adjust spacing to remove them.
Out-of-home: Advertising people see outside their homes, including billboards, transit shelters, buses, airports and digital screens in public spaces. Often shortened to OOH, it is one of the oldest forms of mass advertising.
Owned media: Channels a brand controls itself, such as its website, newsletter, app and social media accounts. Owned media costs less per message than paid media, but its reach depends on the audience the brand has already built.

P

Paid media: Any advertising space or placement a brand pays for, from television spots to search ads and sponsored posts. It buys reach quickly, unlike earned media, which the brand cannot directly purchase.
Palette: The set of colours chosen for a design, brand or illustration. A typical brand palette has a few primary colours plus neutrals and accents, each defined with precise values for print and screen.
Pantone: A proprietary colour-matching system that gives standardised colours numbered references so they can be reproduced accurately anywhere. The Pantone Matching System was introduced in 1963 and is widely used in printing and branding.
Pica: A traditional unit of typographic measurement equal to 12 points, about one-sixth of an inch. Column widths and margins in print layouts are often still measured in picas and points.
Pictogram: A simplified symbol that communicates information without words, such as the figures on washroom doors or airport signs. Pictograms designed for international events, including Olympic Games, have become design landmarks.
Pitch: A presentation in which creative ideas are proposed to win a project or account. A pitch usually includes strategy, sample ads and sometimes rough versions of television scripts or digital campaigns.
Pixel: The smallest unit of a digital image or screen, a single dot of colour. Image dimensions are given in pixels, and higher pixel counts allow larger prints or sharper display on dense screens.
Point: The basic unit of type size. The modern digital point, standardised in desktop publishing during the 1980s, equals one seventy-second of an inch. Body text in print is often set between 9 and 12 points.
Point of sale: Advertising and displays placed where purchases happen, such as shelf signs, counter displays and checkout stands. Point-of-sale material aims to influence a decision at the last moment before buying.
Positioning: The place a brand aims to occupy in customers' minds compared with competitors. The idea was popularised by Al Ries and Jack Trout in a series of articles in 1972.
PPI: Pixels per inch, the density of pixels in a digital image or on a screen. For sharp printing, images are usually prepared at around 300 PPI at their final printed size.
Prepress: All the steps between finished design files and printing, such as checking files, managing colour, imposition and making plates. Prepress teams catch problems like low-resolution images and missing fonts before they become expensive.
Primary colours: The basic colours from which others are mixed. For light they are red, green and blue; for printing inks they are cyan, magenta and yellow. The traditional painter's set is red, yellow and blue.
Print run: The number of copies printed in a single job. Longer runs lower the cost of each copy because setup costs are shared, which is why offset printing suits large runs and digital printing suits short ones.
Process colour: Colour printed by combining the four CMYK inks in varying proportions, rather than using a specially mixed ink. Most full-colour photographs in magazines and brochures are reproduced with process colour.
Product placement: Paid appearance of a branded product within a film, television show, game or video. Broadcasters, platforms and regulators in many countries set rules on how placements must be handled and disclosed to viewers.
Programmatic advertising: Buying and selling digital ad space automatically through software, often in auctions that run in the fraction of a second while a page loads. It lets advertisers target audiences across many sites at scale.
Proof: A trial version of a printed piece, used to check text, layout and colour before the full run. Soft proofs are viewed on screen, while hard proofs are printed to show colour more accurately.
Proximity: A design principle that places related items close together and separates unrelated ones. Proximity tells readers what belongs together, such as a caption and its photo, without needing extra lines or boxes.
Public service announcement: An advertisement made to inform the public or change behaviour rather than sell a product, such as road safety or health messages. Broadcasters often air them free or at reduced rates.
Pull quote: A short, striking quotation from an article repeated in larger type within the layout. It catches the eye of a browsing reader and breaks up long columns of text in magazines and websites.

Q

QR code: A square barcode that phones can scan to open a link or information. Invented in Japan in 1994 for tracking car parts, QR codes became common in advertising and menus after smartphone cameras learned to read them.

R

Ragged right: Text aligned to the left margin with an uneven right edge, also called flush left. It keeps word spacing even and is generally easier to read on screens than fully justified text.
Raster image: An image made of a grid of pixels, such as a photograph. Raster images lose quality when enlarged beyond their resolution, unlike vector graphics, which scale cleanly to any size.
Rate card: A publication or broadcaster's official list of advertising prices for different sizes, slots and frequencies. Large advertisers often negotiate below rate card prices, so it serves mainly as a starting point.
Reach: The number or percentage of people in a target audience who see an ad at least once during a campaign. Reach is paired with frequency to describe how widely and how often a campaign was seen.
Readability: How comfortable a block of text is to read, depending on size, spacing, line length, contrast and layout. A highly legible typeface can still be hard to read if it is set badly.
Rebrand: Changing a brand's name, logo, visual identity or positioning, sometimes all at once. Rebrands range from subtle refinements of a familiar logo to complete overhauls, and they often attract strong public reactions.
Registration: The accurate alignment of separate colour plates or printing passes on one sheet. Poor registration produces blurry edges or thin coloured outlines where inks should meet exactly.
Resolution: The amount of detail in an image, expressed in pixels or as pixels per inch. Low-resolution images appear soft or blocky when enlarged, which is why print requires much more resolution than most screens.
Retargeting: Showing ads to people who have already visited a website or used an app. Also called remarketing, it reminds them of products they viewed and relies on cookies, logins or device identifiers.
RGB: The colour model for screens, which mixes red, green and blue light. Values for each channel run from 0 to 255 in most software, and RGB can display many colours that printing inks cannot reproduce.
Rich black: A black printed with extra cyan, magenta or yellow beneath the black ink to make it deeper and richer. It suits large dark areas, but small text in rich black can look blurred if plates misalign.
River: A distracting channel of white space running down through several lines of text, created when word gaps happen to line up. Rivers are most common in narrow justified columns with poor hyphenation.
Rule of thirds: A composition guideline dividing an image into a three by three grid and placing key elements along the lines or at their intersections. The term was coined by John Thomas Smith in 1797.

S

Saddle stitch: A binding method in which folded sheets are nested and stapled through the spine fold. It is cheap and quick, and it suits booklets, programmes and thin magazines rather than thick publications.
Sans serif: A typeface without the small strokes, called serifs, at the ends of letters. Sans serifs became popular in the twentieth century with faces such as Futura of 1927 and Helvetica of 1957.
Saturation: The intensity or purity of a colour, from vivid to dull grey. Highly saturated colours grab attention, while desaturated tones feel calmer and more muted, and most palettes mix the two.
Scale: The relative size of elements in a design. Changing scale dramatically, such as a huge headline beside small text, creates emphasis, drama and a clear starting point for the eye.
Script typeface: A typeface that imitates handwriting or calligraphy, with flowing joined letters. Script faces suit invitations, logos and short headlines but become hard to read in long passages or all capitals.
Serif: A small finishing stroke at the end of a letter's main strokes, and by extension a typeface that has them. Serif faces such as Garamond and Times New Roman dominated printed books and newspapers for centuries.
Shade: A colour made darker by adding black. Shades, along with tints and tones, let designers build a whole palette from one hue while keeping colours visibly related.
Share of voice: A brand's portion of the total advertising or conversation in its category, compared with competitors. It is often measured as a share of ad spending, media impressions or online mentions.
Signage: The design of signs that identify places and guide people, from street signs to shop fronts and transit maps. Good signage relies on legible type, clear symbols and consistent placement.
Slab serif: A typeface with heavy, block-shaped serifs, also called Egyptian. Slab serifs appeared in the early nineteenth century for posters and advertising, where they were needed to stand out at large sizes.
Slogan: A short, memorable phrase associated with a brand or campaign, also called a tagline or strapline. The best slogans can last for decades and become part of everyday speech.
Small caps: Capital letters drawn at about the height of lowercase letters, used for acronyms, abbreviations and stylish headings. True small caps are redrawn to match stroke weight rather than simply shrunk.
Spot colour: A specially mixed ink printed as a single solid colour, rather than built from CMYK dots. Brands use spot colours, often specified by Pantone number, to make logos match exactly across materials.
Spread: Two facing pages designed as one unit, as in a magazine or book. Designers often run images or headlines across both pages, taking care not to lose important details in the centre fold.
Stereotype: Originally a solid metal printing plate cast from a mould of a page of type, used to print many copies. The word later came to mean a fixed, oversimplified idea about a group of people.
Stock image: A photograph or illustration licensed from a library rather than commissioned. Stock images save time and money, but popular ones appear on many sites, which can make a brand look generic.
Storyboard: A sequence of drawings with notes that plans the shots of a commercial, film or animation. Storyboards let teams test the idea and timing before spending money on filming.
Subtractive colour: Colour created by inks or pigments that absorb, or subtract, parts of white light. Mixing cyan, magenta and yellow moves towards black, which is the principle behind CMYK printing.
Swash: An exaggerated decorative flourish on a letter, such as an extended tail or curl. Swash characters are usually optional alternatives in a font, used at the start or end of words.
Swatch: A sample of a colour, either a printed chip or a stored colour in design software. Swatch books let designers and clients compare exactly how colours will print on different papers.

T

Tabloid: A newspaper format about half the size of a broadsheet. The word also describes a sensational style of journalism, though many respected newspapers have adopted the smaller format.
Tagline: A short line that sums up a brand's promise, often placed with the logo. A tagline usually lasts longer than a single campaign's slogan and appears across packaging, advertising and signs.
Target audience: The specific group of people an ad or campaign is designed to reach and persuade. Defining a target audience shapes every decision, from message and tone to media and timing.
Testimonial: A statement from a real customer or user praising a product, used in advertising. Advertising standards require testimonials to be genuine, honest and based on real experience with the product being promoted.
Thumbnail: A small rough sketch used to explore layout ideas quickly, or a small preview image on a website or video platform. Video thumbnails strongly influence whether people choose to watch.
Tint: A colour made lighter by adding white, or in print a lighter version of an ink created with smaller dots. Tints soften colours for backgrounds and allow subtle variety within a palette.
Tone of voice: The way a brand sounds in its words, from warm to authoritative to playful. Tone of voice can shift by situation, such as cheerful in marketing and calm in customer service, while staying recognisably the same brand.
Tracking: Even adjustment of spacing across a whole word, line or block of text, also called letter-spacing. Small capitals and all-caps headings often look better with slightly increased tracking.
Trade dress: The overall look of a product or package, such as its shape, colour and layout, which can be legally protected when customers recognise it. A distinctive bottle shape is a common example.
Trademark: A name, symbol, phrase or design legally registered or used to identify the source of goods or services. Trademarks prevent competitors from using confusingly similar marks and can last indefinitely if renewed.
Trim size: The final dimensions of a printed piece after it has been cut. Designers set up files at trim size and add bleed around the edges so artwork can run right to the cut.
Typeface: A design for a set of letters, numbers and symbols sharing a consistent style, such as Garamond or Helvetica. A typeface family can include many weights and styles, each a separate font.
Typography: The art and craft of arranging type to make written language readable and appealing. It covers choosing typefaces, sizes, spacing and layout, and it shapes how a message feels before it is read.

U

Unique selling proposition: The single benefit that sets a product apart from competitors and gives people a reason to choose it. The term was popularised by Rosser Reeves in his 1961 book Reality in Advertising.
User experience: The overall experience a person has using a website, app or product, including how easy, useful and pleasant it is. Often shortened to UX, it covers research and testing as well as interface design.
User interface: The screens, buttons, menus and controls through which people interact with software or a device. Often shortened to UI, interface design focuses on layout, visual consistency and clear feedback.

V

Vector graphic: An image defined by mathematical paths rather than pixels, so it can scale to any size without losing sharpness. Logos and icons are usually created as vectors, in formats such as SVG and EPS.
Viewability: A measure of whether a digital ad actually appeared on screen where people could see it. A common industry standard counts a display ad as viewable when half its pixels are visible for one second.
Viral: Describes content that spreads rapidly as people share it with others, much like a contagion. Brands can encourage sharing, but true viral success is hard to plan and usually depends on surprise or humour.
Visual weight: How strongly an element attracts the eye, based on its size, colour, contrast, density and position. Designers balance visual weight across a layout so it feels stable without being rigidly symmetrical.

W

Wayfinding: Design systems that help people find their way through spaces such as airports, hospitals and transit networks. Wayfinding combines signs, maps, colour coding and architecture to guide movement.
White space: Empty space in a design, not necessarily white, used to separate elements and give them room. Generous white space improves readability and makes a layout feel calm and premium.
Widow: A very short last line of a paragraph left at the top of a new column or page, separated from the rest. Designers fix widows by editing the text or adjusting spacing.
Wordmark: A logo made only from the brand's name in a distinctive typographic treatment, without a separate symbol. Wordmarks work well for short, memorable names and are easy to recognise in small sizes.

X

X-height: The height of lowercase letters such as x, measured from the baseline, excluding ascenders and descenders. Typefaces with large x-heights look bigger at the same point size and are often easier to read on screens.

Advertising terms began in the print shop

Plenty of modern advertising terms are older than advertising as a profession. They began as objects. A compositor setting metal type kept capital letters in a case on the upper shelf and small letters in a case below, so upper case and lower case are furniture before they are grammar. Designers still use that shelf.

Leading is the same story. Compositors pushed thin strips of lead between lines of type to space them out, and the word stayed after the metal left. Font comes from the French fonte, a casting, because a font was one size and style of letters cast together. Even a kern was physical: the part of a letter overhanging its body.

Two everyday words also came off the press. A stereotype was a cast metal plate of a whole page, used to print the same image repeatedly. Cliché was the French printers’ name for a similar plate. Both drifted into ordinary speech as names for an idea repeated without thought, which is a fair verdict on plenty of tired ad copy.

From newspaper columns to the language of layout

Newspapers gave design much of its layout vocabulary. Above the fold meant the top half of a folded broadsheet, the part visible on a newsstand, so editors put their strongest story there. Websites borrowed the phrase for whatever appears before scrolling. The fold moves with every screen size, yet the idea that first sight matters most still holds.

Column, gutter, headline, deck and byline all come from the same tradition. Advertisers bought space by the column inch, a block one column wide and one inch deep, which is why so many early press ads were tall and narrow. Display advertising, with large type and pictures, grew alongside classified ads, which were small, uniform and sold by the word.

Measurement had its own fight. French typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier proposed a point system in 1737, and the Didot family refined it later that century. American founders agreed their own point in 1886. Desktop publishing in the 1980s settled on a digital point of exactly one seventy-second of an inch, the value most software still uses.

How graphic design terms got a name of their own

Graphic design terms are younger than the craft. Printers and engravers did the work for centuries without one name for it. Book and type designer W. A. Dwiggins is usually credited with using the phrase graphic design in a 1922 newspaper article to describe the planning of printed matter. It became a common job title only after 1945.

Logo has an older printing root. A logotype was a single piece of metal type carrying two or more letters, cast together because a word appeared so often. The term later shifted to mean a company’s wordmark, then any brand symbol. The entries below use modern meanings, but the old one explains why a designer may say logotype.

Some vocabulary came from mathematics and philosophy rather than workshops. Golden section, for example, appears in an 1835 German textbook by Martin Ohm, according to Wolfram MathWorld, long after Euclid described the proportion. Here is the small digression: designers argue about that ratio far more than mathematicians do, and the mathematicians are usually the sceptical ones.

Branding words: from hot iron to trademark law

Brand comes from an old word for burning. Farmers burned marks into cattle, and makers burned or stamped them into barrels and crates so buyers knew where goods came from. The mark promised a known source. By the late nineteenth century, trademark registers in Britain, the United States and Canada turned that promise into property protected by law.

Twentieth-century marketing added a layer of strategy words. Unique selling proposition was popularised by Rosser Reeves in his 1961 book Reality in Advertising. Positioning entered the vocabulary through a series of 1972 articles by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Brand identity, brand equity and brand architecture followed, mostly from business schools, as companies began to value names as assets.

Colour terms and the arrival of shared numbers

Colour once depended on description and luck. A printer in one city could not be sure what another meant by a warm red. The Pantone Matching System, introduced in 1963, gave colours numbered swatches that printers anywhere could match. A spot colour, mixed to a formula, became different from a process colour built from cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Screens brought RGB, the additive model of red, green and blue light, and with it hex codes such as #FF0000 for pure red. The colour entries in the glossary distinguish these systems because confusing them is a common, expensive error. A logo designed in bright RGB green can turn dull when printed in CMYK, and no setting fixes that afterwards.

Broadcast, regulation and the Canadian vocabulary

Radio and television added their own advertising terms: spot, jingle, sponsor, prime time and rating point. The 1926 Wheaties jingle, often cited as the first sung radio commercial, shows how quickly brands borrowed music. In Canada, the industry wrote rules alongside the new media. The Canadian Code of Advertising Standards was first published in 1963.

Ad Standards, the self-regulatory body that now administers the Code, uses many plain terms from this glossary, such as testimonial. Quebec adds a legal vocabulary of its own about French on signs and packaging, and Bill 96, adopted in 2022, tightened its rules for visible signage again. Readers working in Quebec should check those requirements directly with the province.

Digital advertising terms after 1994

The browser rebuilt the vocabulary again. The first clickable web banner ad ran in October 1994, and its success measure, the click-through rate, became the yardstick for a decade. Impressions, cookies, retargeting, programmatic buying and influencers followed. Many digital terms describe measurement rather than ideas, which says something about what the medium rewards.

The newest layer, as of 2026, concerns automation. Generative tools now write headlines and produce images, so terms such as prompt, synthetic media and disclosure label appear in creative briefs and in rules from platforms and regulators. The timeline of advertising shows how quickly earlier media were absorbed, and the history section covers the campaigns that used them.

How to use this glossary of advertising terms

The A to Z list below groups every entry by category: advertising, branding, print, typography, colour, layout and digital. Filter by category or search a word. Definitions are short and plain, written for students, marketers and anyone reading a brief full of advertising terms. Where a term has a deeper guide, that page goes further.

For type, the typography basics guide explains kerning, leading and hierarchy in context, and colour theory covers hue and contrast. The free design tools put several definitions into practice. You may notice that the oldest words in the list are often the clearest: leading still means exactly what the lead strip did.

Questions about advertising and design terms

What are some basic advertising terms?

A few come up in almost every brief. Reach is how many people see an ad, frequency is how often they see it, and CPM is the cost per thousand impressions. A call to action tells the viewer what to do next. Copy is the written text, and a campaign is a set of ads sharing one idea.

What are some graphic design terms beginners should know?

Start with kerning, the space between two letters, and leading, the space between lines. Hierarchy is the order in which the eye reads elements. White space is empty area used on purpose. Bleed is artwork that runs past the trim edge. CMYK and RGB are the colour models for print and screens.

What is the graphic design term for space between letters?

Two terms cover it. Kerning adjusts the space between one specific pair of letters, such as a capital A next to a V, which often sit too far apart. Tracking, also called letter-spacing, adjusts the space evenly across a whole word or line. Designers usually set tracking first and then kern awkward pairs by hand.

What is the graphic design term for space between lines?

The term is leading, pronounced like the metal. It comes from the thin strips of lead that compositors placed between lines of metal type to open them up. In software it is set as a measurement, and on the web it is called line-height. Body text usually reads well at roughly 1.4 to 1.6 times the font size.

What is considered an advertisement?

In general terms, an advertisement is any message a business or organisation pays for, or controls, to promote a product, service, idea or brand. In Canada, the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards takes a broad view that covers paid media and other promotional messages. Sponsored social posts count too, which is why paid partnerships must be disclosed.

What term describes a smooth gradual transition of colours?

That is a gradient, sometimes called a colour ramp or, in print, a blend. A linear gradient moves in a straight line from one colour to another, while a radial gradient spreads outward from a point. When a printed gradient shows visible steps instead of a smooth change, designers call the fault banding.