digital art terms to know

Typography Terms

1. Typography  – the art of arranging or designing type or processing data and printing from it

  1. Cap Height – the height of a capital letter above the baseline for a particular typeface
  2. Baseline – the imaginary line upon which a line of text rests
  3. X-Height – the distance between the baseline of a line of type and tops of the main body of lower case letters (i.e. excluding ascenders or descenders)
  4. Ascender – the upward vertical stem on some lowercase letters, such as h and b, that extends above the x-height
  5. Descender – The portion of some lowercase letters, such as g and y, that extends or descends below the baseline
  6. Kerning – the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result.
  7. Leading – the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type
  8. Serif – semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols
  9. Sans Serif – one that does not have the small projecting features called “serifs” at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French wordsans, meaning “without”.
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Digital Art Terms to Know

1. Anchor point: A point on a path that indicates a change of direction

2. Resolution: Resolution is the detail an image holds; higher resolution means more pixels (individual, minute areas of illumination on a display screen) in the image, in which more image detail can be achieved; most images are typically 72 dpi (dots per inch)

Example of 300 dpi versus 72 dpi resolution

3. Artboard: Printable portion of the work area, where illustrations can be finalized

4. Clipping mask: An object whose shape masks other artwork so that only areas that lie within the shape are visible—in effect, clipping the artwork to the shape of the mask (the clipping mask and the objects that are masked are called a clipping set)

5. Pen tool: A non-selection tool used in the creation of smooth-edged selections; it creates vector paths that can be converted into selections that in turn can be used to extract or mask groups of pixels

6. Layers: Individual levels in the stacking order of available drawing space that can hold any number of objects

7. Links: A linked image is an image that is linked to an external file, like a shortcut on a computer

Random helpful layering website: http://designmodo.com/transform-duplicate-objects-illustrator/

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