18 Essential Graphic Design Terms You Need to Know

If you're just starting out in the world of graphic design, make sure you're familiar with these terms.

Like all other trades, graphic design also has its own vocabulary. If you’re working with a designer for your project, you might hear some terms that make no sense. Similarly, if you've just started designing, you may come across technical terms that you don’t know yet.

This article will list and explain the most essential terms you'll come across in the field of graphic design.

1. Analogous

Designers use this term to define a specific color pattern. If you select three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, you create an analogous color scheme.

For example, blue, blue-violet, and violet form an analogous color pattern. Here, blue is primary, violet is secondary, and blue-violet is a tertiary color.

2. Complementary

Complementary is also a technical term for describing a color scheme. When designers pick two colors from the color wheel that sit opposite from each other, they’ll say it’s a complementary color scheme.

Related: How to Choose a Color Scheme for Your App: Things to Consider

For instance, pairs like blue and orange, red and green, purple and yellow, etc., are complementary colors.

3. Die Cut

Die-cutting applies to physical media. The process creates a unique effect, as it involves cutting out different areas of a design.

These cuts include creative shapes and various patterns. Die cuts are a part of the finishing workflow for many printed design processes.

4. Flat Design

You’ll see user interface (UI) designers use this term a lot. It involves creating a design with two-dimensional images, sharp edges, lots of open space, and bright color schemes.

The flat design approach is simply the opposite of designs that try to mimic the real world. Instead of creating complex graphics, flat designs illustrate an idea in a way that’s more creative and less chaotic.

5. Hex Codes

Graphic designers and web developers use hex codes to define colors in CSS and HTML. Modern design programs also use this color-coding system.

A hex code represents a color with a string of six digits. For example, #E50914 is the hex code for the unique red color in Netflix's logo.

6. Kerning

When it comes to typography and character spacing, designers use the term kerning. It refers to the blank space between consecutive numbers, letters, or other characters.

Designers may adjust kerning to improve the readability of typefaces when creating a web design, app, ad, or any other graphic. It helps balance the white space between characters, making it look more pleasant to readers.

7. Knolling

Designers use this term to express how shapes, illustrations, or products appear in a design or photograph. Knolling makes designs more symmetric and orderly.

To achieve this effect, designers place objects on a contrasting background and provide a top-down look at the scene. All of the objects are placed at a 90-degree angle, making the design look satisfyingly organized.

8. Leading

Leading refers to line spacing; it's the amount of blank space between two continuous baselines. A properly balanced leading is essential to making blocks of text easily readable.

The lead bands of typewriters are the origin of this term. Typewriters used lead strips to evenly spread lines of text.

9. Logomark

Graphic designers in the logo-making business use this term for graphics or images representing a brand. Logomark is a kind of logo that doesn’t contain the name of the brand.

Related: How to Design a Logo

Instead, a shape, object, image, or illustration speaks for the brand. Twitter’s bird, Nestlé’s nest, and Apple’s apple are good examples of logomarks.

10. Orphans

This term is frequently used when designers refer to the arrangement of text blocks. An orphan is an inconvenient word or short sentence that remains stranded at the end of a text block.

In most cases, they sit alone on a new column, line, or page. Designers aim to remove orphans to maintain the content's aesthetics.

11. Pantone

Anyone who designs digital graphics, print media, fashion, and consumer products uses the Pantone Matching System (PMS) to reproduce colors. It’s the global standard for color-coding, and gives every hue its own number for reference.

For example, Pantone 16-1349 is Coral Rose, while Pantone 18-4143 represents Super Sonic.

12. Raster

Designers often use this term to express the type of graphic they're creating. They can also use the term bitmap image, which is essentially another name for a raster graphic.

Related: Raster vs. Vector Images: What's the Difference?

A raster graphic consists of rectangular pixels. Each pixel has its own characteristic hue, shade, transparency, and saturation. Resizing a raster image often reduces its visual quality.

13. Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is a technique that graphic designers use to find the focal points of any design. To apply the rule of thirds, you need to divide the image into a three-by-three grid.

Then, realign the subject of the image with the intersecting points and grid lines. This technique helps you resize or crop a large image appropriately.

14. Saturation

Saturation refers to the purity or intensity of any hue. When you increase saturation, your design will look more intense. But, if you reduce the saturation, the design will become less vibrant and will appear almost whitish.

15. Scale

Scale describes the relative size between objects and shapes in any design. Adjusting an object's scale can influence how your audience views your design.

By simply adjusting the scale of objects in a design, you can change a viewer's perspective, choose what draws their attention first, and even tell a story.

16. Script Type

Script types are fonts based on modern or traditional handwriting. These typefaces mimic cursive handwritten texts.

Designers use script type if they need to make the design more personal, elegant, or casual looking.

17. Bleed

Graphic designers adjust a design's bleed to ensure that its edges don't get cut off when printed. The term is crucial when creating physical designs.

Some designers make their designs bigger than they need them to be, which helps prevent any visual alteration when it's printed.

18. Triadic

Designers use triadic color patterns when they want objects in a design to appear more lively. Triadic colors are spaced out evenly on the color wheel, making it so that no one color overpowers another.

For instance, red, yellow, and blue is a triadic color scheme.

Get to Know These Graphic Design Terms

The above graphic design glossary might come in handy if you're just learning how to design, or if you're collaborating with a graphic designer.

It isn’t a be-all-and-end-all list of design terms, however. There's plenty more to learn, so you should be inquisitive and creative when discussing or designing graphics for your projects.

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